The belongings that had been with Nash at Oxford and then Scotland these past seven years hadn’t even made it up to his bedchamber before he had hurried out the door to meet Owen. Luckily, Nash’s mother and sister were not at home when he’d arrived from Scotland so he’d been spared explaining why he was rushing out so soon. To explain the call of guilt, he would have had to tell them of the day Owen had been hurt, and that, Nash would not do.
Owen made his way past the large fireplace and to the table in the back corner where Nash was sitting. As he approached, Nash noted the grim set of his friend’s mouth, and fear twisted inside him. He sat forward, his pulse spiking. “What is it? Is it Lilias? Is that why you wrote that you needed to see me today?”
Owen motioned to the server standing nearby to indicate he’d have the same drink Nash was having, and then he pulled out his chair, balanced his cane against the table, and said, “Yes.”
Nash chest squeezed. “Is she hurt?”
“No,” Owen said easily, his gaze flicking momentarily to Nash before he looked down at his hands, which were now resting intertwined on the table. “I wanted to see you in person to ask you not to contact her now that you have returned to Town.”
“I wouldn’t,” Nash replied, his words harsher than he had intended, but everything about Lilias had always made him passionate. “You know I wouldn’t. So why this meeting? Why this request? Have I not refrained from contacting her for seven years, as you asked of me the day after your accident?”
He could recount going to see Owen the next day with perfect clarity. Owen had been in his sickbed with a crushed leg and had looked at Nash with such pain in his eyes.
You’ll win her if you stay, he’d said.You cannot help yourself.You saved her in the water that day, and she thinks of you as a character in one of those nonsense Gothic novels she reads. She thinks you honorable.
The way Owen had said it, as if they both knew it were not true, had been seared in Nash’s memory, and Nash had feared Owen was right. Liliashadbestowed upon him some ridiculous qualities of a character in a book, a man he was not. So he had left without so much as a goodbye to her. It had felt as if he’d reached into his chest and ripped out his heart. He’d stayed away after that—mostly. He’d seen Owen through the years, and they had written letters. Nash knew Lilias and Owen had spent all their time together in the Cotswolds, and Owen had sometimes written about the things he and Lilias had done together.
She had stayed with Owen every day after his accident. Owen had told him about how she had always been there when he awoke, how she had held his hand while reading to him. She had helped Owen push himself to walk and, eventually, had taught him to dance, even with his limp. That had filled Nash with a jealousy that had kept him up many nights, imagining holding her in his arms and twirling her around, making her laugh.
As Owen’s glass scraped across the table and he picked it up, Nash focused on the man. “Have I not kept my promise not to come between you and her?” His head throbbed with his frustration.
Owen’s mouth tightened. “You have. It will just be harder not to see her here in Town at balls and such than it was in the Cotswolds, where there was no reason for the two of you to interact.”
Nash’s fingers curled into a fist under the table. There was no reason for him and Lilias to interact because he had ensured she would not want to speak to him. He’d only responded to one of her letters after he’d departed and that had been to tell her to quit writing him.
He had purposely avoided her for seven years, only going back to the Cotswolds once a year and being very careful whenever he ventured out. He’d seen her twice by chance in those years, and both times had made him feel as if someone had plunged a knife into his gut. Once, when she’d ridden past their property on her horse, and then again last year, after Christmas, when he’d seen her walking with Owen past their home. It had taken all his will not to thunder down his stairs, throw open his door, swallow the distance between them, and rip Owen away from her. They’d been walking so close that their arms had been brushing. It had left Nash shaking.
“How long do you wish me to avoid her?” he finally asked.
Owen tugged on his neckcloth. “Well, I had hoped to be wed by now, but I feel sure it’s coming soon.”
Owen might as well have punched a fist through Nash’s chest. “Oh. So you’ve asked for her hand?” He sounded supremely uninterested, which was good.
“Not yet.” Owen’s mouth pinched. “I, well, she has been so independent, and I wanted to give her time to realize that she needed to settle into her lot as a woman.”
Nash felt a tic start at that statement, but he bit back any comment. Lilias’s “lot” was not his concern. “And you feel she has settled?” He felt as if he had choked out the question.
“I think she is very close to giving up her girlhood notions that women can flaunt all rules of Society, and I worry that your reappearance could remind her of a time she was recklessly independent,” Owen said.
Nash gritted his teeth at that news, though he himself had worried what trouble her independent nature might bring her.
“I think she sees how loyal I am to her, how I have been there for her,” Owen continued. “I know how she feels about me, of course.”
That sentence took Nash back to four years ago when Owen had written that Lilias had told Owen she loved him. The news had sent Nash into the first of many women’s beds. Initially, he’d done so in hopes of forgetting Lilias entirely, and when that hadn’t worked, to just forget her for a while. The brief moments never lasted, though. She always returned to his mind and his heart, tempting him to simply drift back to her. But it wasn’t real. She would not think him so wonderful if she knew the truth of what he’d done to Thomas and to Owen.
“Yes,” he agreed, because what else was there to do? “It’s good that you know that. I’m certain it’s been hard to wait for her.” Though Nash would have waited a thousand lifetimes if there had been any way for him and Lilias to be together.
“It’s not hard because I have always known she would eventually be mine.”
The image of Nash’s hands around his friend’s neck startled Nash.Christ.He shoved his chair back, not wanting to be here. Owen glanced at him in surprise. “I’m sorry,” Nash said. “I just recalled that my mother has invited guests for dinner.”
“That’s fine,” Owen said with a wave of his hand. “If you do happen to run into Lilias, it might be best to treat her with cool regard. No sense in stirring up a past that does not matter.”
Was Owen referring to finding Lilias and Nash in each other’s arms? No, Nash would not want to stir up those memories any more than they already stirred themselves up within him. The damn things refused to stay buried.
The rogue had returned.
Lilias Honeyfield stood outside Nash’s home in Mayfair, her fist raised to grasp the knocker on his gleaming dark door. The clop of hooves on the busy lane hummed in her ears as memories assaulted her. Seven years’ worth of memories, to be exact. Seven years of longing, of hoping, of hating and loving. She was exhausted, and she wanted to put an end to it all. As horribly embarrassing as this would likely be, she had to do it. Yet, her gloved hand did not move. It stayed hovering just out of reach of the shiny brass door knocker.
