A slightly awkward silence fell.
“Well,” she said brightly, jumping to her feet. “Well.”
James looked down at her. “Would you like to leave?”
“Yes,” Violet said immediately. His gaze unnerved her; she had so much she still wanted to say to him, and yet in this moment no precise idea of how to get it out.
She opened her mouth to speak, sucking in a deep breath—and coughed.
Later, she would find it amusing how much trouble a single bit of dust could cause. They were in a library, after all—dust was rather to be expected, particularly when the library in question didn’t seem to be as heavily used as James’s and her own. In any case, this speck of dust caused her to cough once, twice—and by the time she had regained her composure, the smile had faded from James’s face.
“I’d offer you a handkerchief,” he said coldly, “but no doubt you’ve one tucked away in there somewhere for just this purpose.”
Violet’s mouth fell open. “I beg your pardon?”
He took her arm in a firm grip, attempting to lead her out of the library, but she resisted, digging her heels in and wrenching her arm free of his. James stopped, too, turning to her with his hands on his hips.
“Was all this just part of your game?” he asked, gesturing around him as though to encompass the library in general, the window seat in particular, and most especially the activities that had so recently taken place upon it. “Do you have a bloody plan written out somewhere? Does it tell you how often each day you should cough to raise my sympathies?” He took two steps closer to her, his cheeks flushed, eyes blazing. “Violet, I know you don’t have consumption.”
He appeared to think he’d thrown some sort of gauntlet, as though she’d cower and retreat upon this revelation. She, however, was so angry that the words practically poured out of her as she took a step closer to him, so close that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.
“I know you know, you bloody bastard!” She reached out and whacked at his chest. “I had a piece of dust in my throat! I’m so frightfully sorry,” she added, sarcasm dripping from every word. “I didn’t realize you were so sensitive to my health that a mere cough would unnerve you so.”
James let out an incredulous laugh. “Says the woman who’s spent a fortnight wandering about our house coughing whenever she’s in earshot, summoning an actor to pose as her physician?”
“I suppose that’s somehow more beyond the pale than a man flirting with the woman his brother once courted out of some misguided quest for revenge,” Violet said mock thoughtfully. “How foolish of me not to realize that you, as ever, occupy the moral high ground.”
“I apologized for that,” James said stiffly, and Violet could practically see him sliding an aloof mask into place upon his face. And, all at once, she decided that she simply would not allow it.
“Yes, for that,” she said scathingly. She reached out a fist to pound upon his chest once again, but he caught her curled hand in his own viselike grip, refusing to release it. “Has it ever, even once, occurred to you to apologize to me for anything that’s happened over the course of the past four years? Did it ever occur to you that I might like an apology for having my happiness destroyed?”
“I think there’s plenty of blame to go around on that front.” Despite the fact that he was standing mere inches away from her, that her hand was still caught in his grasp, that just a few minutes earlier he had been inside her, James suddenly seemed very, very far away. And then, just for a moment, his mask slipped—he looked younger, somehow, and just as lonely as she felt. He looked like the man she had fallen in love with, who had in truth been little more than a boy.
“You were the one who walked out of that room,” he said very quietly.
Violet blinked, for a moment unaware of what he was referencing. After a beat, she realized he was referring to that terrible morning, when she had finally fled the drawing room so as not to burst into tears.
“You were supposed to follow me,” she replied, her voice little more than a murmur. And then she turned and walked toward the doorway.
“Where are you going?” His voice sounded hoarse, entirely lacking his usual confident tone.
“I’ll ask Diana to take me home.” She turned to glance over her shoulder. “And don’t follow me now. Only follow me when you’re ready to admit you still love me, and to let me love you in return.”
And then she swept through the room toward the doorway and let the heavy door fall shut behind her as she departed.
Much later that evening—after James had rejoined his friends’ card game, after he had drunk considerably more brandy than he ought to have, after he had endured a bumpy, jostling carriage ride back to his house, without any company other than lingering traces of Violet’s perfume—he found himself outside his wife’s door, hesitating.
He’d raised his hand to knock, then lowered it thrice now, and he was growing disgusted with himself. He pressed his forehead against the wood of the door, relishing its coolness on his overheated skin. Violet’s words of earlier echoed through his brain—there was so much there to process that he scarcely knew where to start. One part kept coming back to him, though: When you’re ready to admit you still love me, and to let me love you in return.
Love.
Violet still loved him.
And she thought that he still loved her.
And, as usual, she was completely, utterly, infuriatingly correct.
How had he thought that he didn’t care for her? How had he believed that he could go the rest of his life without the feeling of her arms wrapped around him, her lips pressed to his, their hips moving together in a perfect rhythm? The cynical part of him tried to regain control, reminding him that he had just ended a rather long dry spell, that any tumble would have had a similar effect upon him—
And yet he couldn’t make himself believe it.
It had been different, and special, because it had been Violet. He didn’t want anyone else. Just Violet.
And of course he’d done his damnedest to ruin it all. He winced, recalling the look upon her face when he had attacked her for the slightest cough. To be sure, one indignant part of his brain piped up, it was rather like the boy who cried wolf—how, precisely, was he to know that this cough, distinct from all the others, had been genuine?
You might have considered the timing, the more reasonable part of him said by way of reply. James winced again. The timing, indeed. There was nothing quite like making love to one’s wife after a lengthy drought only to immediately attack her for having a bit of dust caught in her throat.
Not for the first time in recent days, he felt like an utter bastard.
However, one thing was clear: at the moment, he was in no condition to go barging into his wife’s room, demanding to speak with her. It was the middle of the night, for one thing—she was likely asleep, and unless she’d changed a great deal in the past four years, he didn’t think she’d take kindly to being woken from a dead sleep by a slightly intoxicated husband with no clear idea of what to say.
So instead he returned to his bedchamber and tried to ignore the connecting door. He undressed, trying not to think about the wife in a similar state of undress lying on the opposite side of that door. A wife who, just a few short hours before, he had . . .