“No,” she said very softly and sadly.
“You cannot control them, you know.” He glanced at her over his shoulder, the shadow so thick around him she could not see his expression. “You cannot monitor their every mood, gather every whisper about them all. Perhaps leaving them will help you live your own life instead of fretting about theirs.”
She blasted through the shadows to face him but found each explosive word she wished to hurl his way caught in her throat. Fear, yes. It lived in her always, a snarling thing.
But she was not its only victim.
She poked his chest, rocking him backward. “And you cannot hide away for the rest of your life! I may seek control, but so do you. I may fret about everyone, but you fret about no one but yourself. I may live tired and worried, but it is better than loneliness.” She stepped backward, clutching her hands to her belly. “But you are not truly concerned with that, are you? I could close my ears and fight my fears for you. What I cannot do is tear myself in two. I cannot be Mrs. Trent with you and Isabella Merriweather with everyone else. I have pretended to be your wife, and I will not pretend to be otherwise for the rest of my life. Can’t you face your fears, too?”
“Not fears. Truth.”
“Youmust knowthey will accept you.”
“Must I know that? How can I? When everything about the world proves otherwise? When the way everyone stared at me in the ballroom, how they whispered, proves otherwise?”
“Rowan, whispers cut but they are not knives. They cannot scar you unless you let them.”
“You’ve made your decision, then?” He sounded hollow, his voice echoing in the empty night. “It is likely the right one. Hestia is a place that exists between other places. It’s only there between the starting point and the destination. I am the same, Lady Isabella. I am not your destination. No matter what it felt like before. It was nothing morethan a trick of the light.” He strode down the street, his tall, rigid frame shrinking with each step.
She ran after him, her heart breaking in two as she cried out, “You were my light. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Because now you’re gone.”
He did not turn around. He did not answer. Not even his steps hitched.
Still, she ran. “You’re ready to kill me off, then?”
Finally, he froze, as if her words had become an arrow hitting him right in the shoulder. “It was always the agreement.”
“You want to marry me.” Why couldn’t she take the yearning out of her voice? The pain? “You didn’t care about my snooping. You didn’t care about the books. You discover my brother is a duke, and that sends you running?”
The moon shone high above, shedding silver light over his dark hair and muddy coat. Not even his shoulders lifted with the efforts of breathing. He seemed to blend into the night; it swallowed every detail of him, draping him in the shadows she’d met him in. He’d retreated there, and she did not think she could follow.
“Your brother,” he said, “can do as he pleases. He could ruin Mr. Haws’s life. He has all the power, and the rest of us none. Mr. Haws was just trying to take some for himself. It is your brother’s world. We are all just travelers through it.”
“You do not know him. You know nothing of him. Samuel cannot have anything and everything. He could not have love if you had not brought him that letter. Everyone, duke or sailor’s son, everyone deserves love.”
“I should not have accosted a man like Mr. Haws for a man like your brother. Not even for you.” He stalked to the corner of the street, and still she followed, and this time, he turned when he stopped. “You’re the same as Clearford. You have a home and a family and a place in the world. Yet unlike him, you play at being other than you are.”
“You asked me to play. You demanded I pretend to be your wife.”
His shoulders were stiff and wide, and the thin dark shadow of his mouth was unmovable. A small woman like her could never move this mountain of a man, this stoney crag. But she’d been mistress of thoseshoulders, that mouth. That man. He’d once given himself freely to her, and it seemed impossible he would not do so again if she could only find a way through. Her arm floated up, fingers reaching, stretching, calling out, screaming out. So close. His warmth seared her. If she touched him, would his stoney face melt? Would he wrap her tight in his arms and nuzzle his face in her shoulder? Would he whisper in her ear, soft and low and sweet, that he didn’t care who her brother was, didn’t care about the lady in front of her name, that he knew her and wanted her and—
He stepped backward, rounded the corner, and disappeared into the night.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The single bite of buttered scone sat like a stone in Isabella’s belly. She pushed the plate away and sipped at her tea instead. The warmth of it dissipated the throbbing in her head. Slightly. She pressed her fingertips into her temples and rolled them around. The last guest of last night’s entertainment had left but—she glanced at the clock on the mantel in the breakfast room—five hours ago.
She’d danced every damn dance after Rowan left. Better than crying.
And she’d laughed with every hopeful suitor. Also better than crying.
And she’d kept a watchful eye on every door.
But Mr. Haws had never arrived. Hopefully, he and his family scurried back to where they’d come from. She’d love to never see him again.
Samuel did not suffer from her own exhausted ill mood. He sat next to her, legs crossed, chomping on a point of toast and swinging his foot to a tune she could not hear.
Gertrude and June played in a spot of sun nearby, having finishedtheir morning repast with record speed before returning to their entertainments—a doll for June and a book for Gertrude.
