Her heart was thudding loudly in her chest.
“And now I have found someone, you want to talk?” She did not mean for it to sound like an accusation, but it did.
“I did not know how,” he said, “you may be able to communicate freely but I do not possess such capacities.”
She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked back at the garden.
“You say that as an excuse.”
“Excuses are for weak men. I’m only telling you things how they are. Is it so difficult for you to see that we might be different from one another?”
She turned his words around in her mind, trying to make some sense of them.
“That is not enough,” she said. “I am sorry, but it is not enough.”
“Temperance.”
She was fully shaking now, feeling overcome with emotion.
“It is so easy for you to have an explanation to everything but what you do not see is that…. These things… when you say them like this… I..”
At that moment, whatever little self-control she had remaining snapped.
“Don’t you see? I love you,” she blurted.
Temperance had never been in love before, much less confessed something like this out loud. But somehow, in her head she had assumed that it would always be a romantic moment.
The reality was different, and a silence fell between them.
“Do you mean that?” Harper asked in a careful voice. The tension between them felt thick enough to be cut with a knife.
“I have for some time,” she said, looking at him with a forlorn expression, “I am aware that it does not change anything what I am going to do because whatever you feel…. I know you feel something… I am not going to spend my life waiting for a man who cannot say it. Who looks at me the way you look at me and still cannot say it.” She turned to go back inside but then spoke again.
“I do not feel even an ounce of the same emotion for Elias, but at least, he does not keep me guessing and remains clear with hisintentions,” the hurt in her voice was palpable. “Something that you have never done.”
She took one step toward the door, but Harper was quicker than her. Immediately, he had moved several steps closer to her and his hand closed around her wrist.
“What are you trying to say here?” he said, his voice thick was emotion. “That you believe that Elias is a safer option than myself? You want to marry him, but tell me that you love me?”
Her heart ached even more hearing the words from his mouth.
“You understand that is a safer option,” she went on, not wanting to hold back any longer. “But do you see why? It’s because he will not… marry me out of pity. He does not see it as a generosity that he is bestowing on me.”
Anger flashed in his expression, and he tightened his hold onto her hand.
“I would not marry you out of pity,” he said. “I want you to know that. Whatever you think, whatever you have decided about my motives, that is not it. You’ve concocted it out of your imagination.”
“Yes, because my imagination was all that I had as you never bothered to provide me the clarity that I needed. Please now, let me go.”
He wouldn’t let her move.
“Harper,” she warned again, but there was no conviction in her voice.
“Don’t go like this,” he said.
Suddenly, he was moving closer to her. Harper, who had been someone extremely mindful of propriety, was now closing the gap between them. So much that she could take in his scent, which was fresh and masculine. Intoxicating, in a strange way.
“If you move any closer…”
