The door opened, and James came in. He was travel-worn, his coat slightly creased. He handed his hat to the footman with the distracted look of a man whose attention was already somewhere else.
He looked up as he stepped into the entrance hall, and when he spotted her, his face… It lit up. Those were the only words for it. Whatever he had been carrying for four days, all of it simply vanished and was replaced with relief.
It was the most unguarded she had ever seen him.
Then his eyes moved. Past her face to the trunks by the door. To the maids standing by her trunks. To Briggs’s expression, to her buttoned coat, to her gloves.
The expression on his face did not change. It simply… froze, somewhere between the warmth of arriving and the uncertainty of understanding while he read the room.
“What’s happening?” he croaked.
She looked at him across the entrance hall, her chin lifting.
“I am going to Blackmoor,” she announced.
CHAPTER 27
“What do you mean you’re going to Blackmoor?”
The excitement running through him quickly fizzled out.
He had been absurdly pleased by the thought of surprising Isadora by arriving earlier. He had even found himself smiling as the carriage turned beneath the familiar stone archway.
Hearing her say those words felt like icy water poured over his warm heart.
“I mean,” Isadora said coldly, “that I am returning to Blackmoor.”
He searched her face for a sign that this was a dreadful joke. There was none.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
“I must have misunderstood.”
“You did not.”
He stared at her. The hall suddenly felt impossibly warm. The maids and footmen scurried away.
“Why?” He looked at the trunks. At her face.
He had come home from London with a letter in his breast pocket that he had written and revised and nearly sent three times before deciding the words needed to be said in person.
He had left the reverend’s house at four in the morning because waiting until a reasonable hour felt suddenly impossible. He had spent four hours in a carriage thinking about what he was going to say when he walked through the door.
He had not prepared for this.
“I’ve been gone four days. Everything between us was… What could possibly have?—”
He took a step toward her.
“What has happened?” he asked.
It was not a question exactly, more a statement that asked for the room to explain itself.
“You truly do not know?”
“No.”
