“Say it,” Helena said.
“I don’t know whatright by meeven means to him.” She turned. “I don’t know if I am a debt he’s settling or a…”
She stopped herself again, trailing off. The end of that sentence was too much to say plainly, in this room, with six days until the wedding.
“Annabelle.” Helena’s voice dropped. “What do you feel? Not what he feels. What do you feel?”
Annabelle looked at the glass, her own face looking back at her, pale and uncharacteristically uncertain.
There were a number of things she could say that were true. She could say she was angry, which she was. Or that she was frightened, which was also true. She could also say she did not know what to expect from Thursday, or from the days that followed it; all of those things were true.
What she did not say was the other true thing…he was the one who made the rest of it considerably worse: she had wanted him to cometo her. She had wanted him to say what he had said in that garden in the daylight, without an audience requiring it of him.
She had wanted to bechosen, not worked around.
“Ask him,” Helena said. She said it the way she said everything, she had already finished deciding. “Before the wedding, for yourself. You deserve to know what you’re walking into.”
“And if the answer…” Annabelle trailed off, unable to get herself to finish the words.
“If the answer is wrong, you’ll know. And knowing is better than going in wondering.” Helena finished for her, leaving Annabelle nowhere to hide behind.
Annabelle looked at the window for a long moment before glancing back at Helena with Newton resettled in her lap.
Six days.
She had six days to decide whether she was brave enough to ask the question, and brave enough to receive whatever came back.
Chapter Twenty
“Ididn’t want to disappoint you like this,” Annabelle said.
They were standing at the foot of St. George’s steps, ten yards from the door, close enough that the sound of the organ inside had grown distinct. Lucien had not moved since the carriage stopped. His hat was in his hand, and he turned the brim once between his fingers before he answered.
“You haven’t disappointed me.” He looked at her, and the light off the steps was very white; she could see he had tried to shave twice that morning, there was a small nick at his jaw he hadn’t noticed. “Not once in your life. I want that said before we go in.”
“What?” Annabelle blinked, and her brother returned his attention to the door.
“He’s trapped you,” Lucien said. “I know what he told Lady Rosenhall in that garden. That he couldn’t, wouldn’t, marry you. And then the license, the letter, all of it arranged before anyonehad the chance to ask you what you—” He stopped and looked down at the hat in his hands. “I can hold both. Being angry at him and not at you.”
“He will be kind to me,” Annabelle said. She had decided this before she got into the carriage, had decided it and then held it for the duration of the ride, and it was still what she believed. “I am certain of it.”
Lucien grunted. “Being kind is not enough. You deserve?—”
Annabelle felt the warmth of her brother’s affection for her in those cut-off words, even though he had spent the better part of the last week grouching his way through the house.
“And there is James.” She said the words and knew they were true, even as she used them to head him off. “He is a lovely boy. I am very fond of him.”
Lucien looked at her for a beat too long before he made a sound she recognized as one that meant he had run out of argument and knew it. So, he pulled her in close: his chin against her hair, both arms, the way he’d held her the winter after their father died, when she was thirteen and had not known how to be less frightened by the world.
“I only wanted to be the one,” he said, into her hair. “To find you someone you truly wanted. Someone worthy of you.”
She closed her eyes and wanted to tell him. She wanted to say:I do want Dominic, even though I do not know what I am to him, and that is the one thing that makes all of this frightening.
But she pressed her palm flat against his lapel instead, once, and pushed away from him. “You’re a good brother, Lucien. You always have been.”
Lucien’s jaw tensed, then he gulped.
“I love you,” he told her.
