Chapter 24
“This is ridiculous, Jonathan. It will never work.”
“It wasyourplan.”
“Yes, but you ought to have pointed out how horribly it would fail.” Her eyes flicked around her husband’s study, reminding Willow of one little obstacle—her husband’s intelligence. He was bound to see straight through their plan. Fortunately, he had given her space.Verbalspace. Unfortunately, his presence—always lingering—touched her to the bone. It was there in each beating pulse under her skin, in the gooseflesh rippling over her arms. Her awareness of him was absolute.
As were those blank pages he had left on her desk.
They had called into questioneverything.
“It won’t fail as long as he drinks the brandy.”
“That’s all well and good. But I have to drink the brandy, too, or at least give the appearance of drinking.”
“As long as you don’t drink more than a tiny sip, you’ll be fine.”
“And if he notices I’m not drinking?”
“Why would he notice that? You’re a woman.”
Willow turned to glare at him.
Jonathan held up his hands in surrender. “Just use words like freedom, separation, andlover. He will drink. Trust me.”
Willow shook her head, unconvinced. “If I throw words like that around—mind you, I still don’t know how I’m going to incorporate them into a sentence—Ambrose will most assuredly want to keep his wits about him and not drink.”
“Trust me, little sister, there is no one alive who can navigate my brother’s mind better than I—he will drink.”
She scoffed, her eyes darting to the brandy in question. “How do you know?”
“Call it male intuition, but faced with the prospect of losing you, his wife, Ambrose will claw up to the ceiling.”
Willow scrunched her brows together. “What?”
“His faculties will desert him,” Jonathan clarified.
“That’s assuming he had any in the first place.”
“I believe he cares more about you than even he is aware.”
Here’s to hoping, Willow thought bitterly, then sighed.
Naturally, she felt she was partly to blame for her current predicament. In the course of her weeks married to Ambrose, she had ample time to fight for her sister. Instead, she had taken a subtler approach, attempting to work on the man rather than the matter. It mattered little that Willow had thought she’d have more time to persuade him to let his grievance go, or that she’d given him the benefit of the doubt to do the right thing. She’d still ended up here, having to orchestrate a kidnapping of her husband in service of her sister’s future.
A future Jonathan had aided in securing when he discovered Holly’s whereabouts and freed her. Whereupon her sister had made one request: A wedding.
Tomorrow.
Which brought them to this moment—attempting a hairbrained scheme to get Ambrose well and truly out of the way. Plus, the timeline gave them precious little time to not only remove him from the equation but also put together a wedding.
“I still cannot believe my sister fell in love again so soon. And with the Marquis of Warton, of all men! And after I told her not to!”
“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Jonathan murmured. He cast her A Look. “Regardless of what you demand of it.”
Willow stuck out her tongue. But her mind was already wandering back to those blank pages. She had thought Ambrose incapable of change after that fateful night she discovered his deception. Her mindhaddemanded she cut him loose. Her heart was stubbornly refusing.
To her heart, those pages resembled hope.
