Page 63 of The Subtle Craft of Courting Kate

“The hell you don’t,” Andrew snorted, and he crammed one hand into his coat pocket to fish out a handkerchief. “Here,” he said, dangling it across the table to her. “Can’t abide tears.”

On instinct Kate reached out to take it, crumpling the soft linen in the clench of her fingers. “I’m not crying,” she said defensively, but the sniffle that followed and the trickle of moisture that slid down her chin and dropped onto her plate put the lie to it. Her eyes burned and stung with the valiant, if futile, attempt to stem the tears. Humiliated all over again, Kate shrank back in her chair and swabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. “I’m so sorry,” she blurted out again, cringing at the hysterical little warble that had crept into her voice.

Andrew rolled his eyes heavenward and heaved a long, harassed sigh. “And just how much of all this,” he asked, making a gesture toward her with the point of his knife that Kate assumed was meant to encompass the whole of her and her tempestuous emotions besides, “is my ne’er-do-well brother responsible for?”

Kate stifled a hiccough with the fingers of one hand and pressed the other to her chest as if it might hold the tatters of her heart together. How would it be fair to cast blame upon Elliot for her own feelings? And to his own family, no less!

“The fault is mine,” she said, the words tearing at her throat. “I should never have come to London. Truly, the fault is mine.” The tears would not stop coming. She had thought she had shed them all last evening, but she had been so very wrong.

“Somehow,” he said, a sardonic slant to his voice, “I hold that very much in doubt.”

But it was true. It was true, and saying it wasn’t didn’t make it so. On trembling legs Kate rose from her chair, only distantly cognizant of how Andrew’s gaze followed her warily, as if she were some manner of creature he had never seen before, some wild animal that had disturbed the peace of his brother’s house. Her fingers twisted the handkerchief between them as she paced fretfully. “It’s not his fault,” she reiterated, her shoulders rising and falling in a jerky shrug. “But—but I have done what I came to do, and it is time for me to leave.” To go back to Northampton. Back to her small, familiar, quiet life. Back to her sheep and her books and her tromps through the countryside, where there was no intrusion of inconvenient emotions, where she knew exactly who she was and what she was meant for.

Back to a time before she had let herself imagine more. Was it even possible to go back to that? To cull the memory of her time in London as easily as one might pluck out a splinter from one’s flesh?

“You’ve found him a wife, then?” Andrew asked in tones of increasing irritation. And then, “Sit down. All that pacing is making me dizzy.”

“Miss Applegate,” Kate said, on a swift turn back toward the window. “She’s perfect. Truly perfect. Everything he asked for in a wife.” A shredded sob tripped across her lips.

A disdainful sniff followed. “I can assure you that Miss Applegate—whoever she is—is not perfect, and Elliot would not marry her even if she was,” he said. “Kate, sit down, for the love of God.”

“He will!” Kate insisted, and wrung her fingers as she bowed her head. “He will, because I told him to do it.” She just hadn’t realized how much it was going to hurt. How it would feel like killing her own heart. But he would be happy. How could he not be? And she had been his friend too many years not to want happiness for him.

Even if it would not be with her.

Of course she wanted him to be happy. But was it not permissible to be sad for herself, just for a little while? Just until she could determine how to pack all of these wretched, troublesome feelings away and learn to go on?

“Elliot has never once in his life done anything only because he was told to,” Andrew said, with a deep, exasperated sigh. “He’s the baby of the family. He’s always done exactly as he pleases.”

But Elliot trusted Kate’s judgment implicitly. And he had asked her to find him a wife. His request—not her suggestion. “He has got plans for it already,” she said. “He intends to purchase land from your brother and to build a house of his own in Northampton.” Where they would raise children and dogs. Where they would walk the same paths that she and Elliot had always walked together. See the same sunsets; watch the same stars brighten the night sky.

“Would you sit down!”

The roar startled Kate so severely that she jumped—and sat. Immediately, in the chair she had so recently vacated, her hands falling to her lap, twisting the handkerchief he’d given her between them.

“Christ,” Andrew hissed beneath his breath, scrubbing at his face with one hand. “Only wanted a bit of breakfast,” he muttered as he fisted his fork in his hand and stabbed resentfully at a bit of egg as if he had lost the taste for it. “Family’s gone to hell in my absence.”

Kate drew a shuddering breath. “Lord Andrew—”

“If you absolutely must, Dr. Holbrook would be preferable to me. I’d prefer a title I have earned to one I was born into.” That bright blue gaze speared her, pinned her in her place as he chewed. “Whatever my fool of a brother might have told you, I can promise you that he never intended to marry at Devon’s command. And certainly not to Miss Applegate, regardless of how suitable she might be. Why would he marry her,” he said blandly, as he spread a pat of butter upon a piece of toast, “when he has always been in love with you?”

Chapter Twenty Five

Kate swayed in her seat, as lightheaded and dizzy as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Her hands clutched the handkerchief threaded through them so tightly that she was surprised the delicate linen had not torn clean through. “What?” she whispered.

Andrew skewered her with that vivid, blue-eyed stare. “Have I been somehow unclear?”

“But that’s—that’s just—” Preposterous. Wasn’t it? The last dregs of the breath that had grown stale in her lungs shuddered out, and odd little starbursts danced around the edges of her vision. “You’re wrong,” she said on a sharp inhale, struggling to draw breath back into her starved lungs. “You’re just…just wrong.” He had to be wrong.

Another jab of his knife in her direction, as if his patience had worn thin. “If you had had to endure the sheer volume of lovelorn sighs and disconsolate moping as I have, you would know better than that,” he said.

“I do know!” Kate said, jolting up from her chair once more to slam her palms down upon the table, locking elbows which wanted to buckle beneath her. “I do know! You—you haven’t been to Longthorpe Manor in years! How could you possibly know as much, when I—” When she hadn’t. When she hadn’t even suspected.

“Because the boy had been desperately in love with you for half his life, possibly longer. He’s spent years and years mooning over you.” He tore into the last pastry upon his plate. “Don’t you think that if he were interested in marrying Miss Applegate, he would be dancing attendance upon her at every available opportunity? And yet”—the final bit of pastry demolished, Andrew kicked back his chair and rose to his feet—“this very morning I was obliged to step over his prone body on my way into the house, because for some godforsaken reason he’d chosen to sleep on the steps. He has got lodgings of his own, Kate, only a few streets away. But he slept here the night through, on cold stone. Why do you think that is?” Andrew straightened the lapels of his coat, reached for his tea and downed the last of it. “Rhetorical question,” he said as Kate fumbled for an answer. “I know the answer already even if you do not care to see it.”

The faintly censorious tone he’d employed scraped raw Kate’s last nerves. “Did you come only to condemn me?”

“No,” he said, blinking in surprise at the accusation. “I came for breakfast. Hadn’t even the faintest idea you were in town. But I am about to be late for an appointment, so I must ask you to excuse me. You can keep the handkerchief if you like.” A brief bow, and he turned on his heel and stalked right out of the dining room as abruptly as he’d entered it, with no apparent care or thought to the havoc he had wreaked upon Kate’s already turbulent state of mind.