Clever of him, then, to let them linger for five years.
“Apthorp?” Constance asked in a tired voice, walking into the room. “Have you come back for another round of persecuting me?”
He rose. She was in a voluminous white night rail of thick cotton that swallowed her from the top of her neck to her toes. He’d seen her many times in her fashionable silk dressing gowns when she’d swanned into breakfast late as he was leaving, and been indignant at her habit of traipsing through the house in such unsuitable attire. But this prim ensemble, though it covered more of her, somehow made her seem more exposed.
He wanted to tell Rosecroft not to look at her.
“Forgive me for disturbing you so late,” he said.
She said nothing, but her eyes conveyed she was not pleased to see him.
Apthorp glanced at Rosecroft. “I don’t suppose you would give us a moment of privacy?”
Rosecroft sighed. “I’ll be on the terrace having a cigar.” He gestured at the French doors off the parlor. “With the door open. Don’t be pert. And don’t make her cry.”
Constance waited, arms crossed over her breasts, as his cousin went off, whistling.
“Why are you here?”
At her contemptuous tone he felt shy and ridiculous, but nevertheless reached down and held out his offering. “I brought you something. By way of amends.”
She gingerly took the fat armful of red roses that he’d coarsely tied into a bouquet with garden twine.
“How perfectly hideous,” she said coldly.
He was capable of giving a woman an elegant bouquet, but he’d thought perhaps it might be more meaningful to give her the inelegant one that she’d imagined in her story about the maze.
Now he felt foolish. She didn’t remember.
“Uh, yes. I’m sorry they’re a mess. It was a kind of a joke—a poor one, rather—er, a reference to your—”
She looked up and met his eyes. “To my tragic little story about my broken heart?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“You realize it was fake.”
He closed his eyes. “I know. Would you read the note?”
She unfolded the card he’d attached to the bouquet. “Lady Constance,” she read aloud warily. “Please accept these flowers as an apology for my harsh words to you. Not just this afternoon, but in years past.”
She paused and looked at him uncertainly. He bit his lip and waited for her to read the rest.
“Please know,” she continued, her voice softer, “that despite the strained moments in our history, there has never been a time when I did not admire your spirit, intelligence, and beauty. I regret that I ever made you doubt you had my high opinion. I know these next three weeks will be a trial, but I hope that we can endure them as friends.”
She looked up at him, and her eyes were fierce with some emotion. “Friends? Is that what we are to each other? I’m not sure we ever have been.”
He didn’t know the answer. A week ago he would have said they were. But it seemed he’d not fully understood how she’d perceived him.
“I’d like to be,” he said finally. “I think this would be easier if we were.”
She sank down onto the sofa that she’d reclined on so imperiously earlier in the day. “If you wish to be my friend, perhaps I should be frank. You have never seemed terribly fond of me. As far as I can tell, you formed a low opinion of me in Devon, and have disapproved of me ever since.”
He sat down beside her, trying to muddle through his own feelings about the torture that had been that week in Devon. How she’d arrived, looking like a vision. How he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. How, at every turn, she’d signaled he was not the kind of man she deemed worthy of her interest.
Lord Apthorp is uncommonly pedantic about soil drainage, is he not?
Who will be the hero in my scene? I won’t ask Lord Apthorp—he is far too busy with his letters to engage in such trifles.
What a grim young man is your Lord Apthorp. Why does he come here, if all he does is read his books and make notations in his ledger? Were no charming gentlemen available?
She’d made no secret of finding him a bore. Or worse: slightly absurd.
And having just lost the remainder of his family fortune in a humiliating, public way, neither he, nor the rest of England, disagreed with her. He was proving himself to be exactly the kind of errant peer his father had always warned him not to be: irresponsible and incompetent. Unworthy of his place.
He’d despised himself that summer.
He’d wanted out of his own skin that summer.
If it had not been that the Rosecrofts had insisted, he’d never have gone to that house party, for any time he set foot in public, all he heard was the whispers.
Imagine being asked to do so little with so much, and still managing to piss it all away.
Constance’s obvious contempt for him had only confirmed his low opinion of himself. Because he’d craved her admiration, and he’d known that as he was, he’d never warrant so much as a second glance.
That week had changed him. He’d resolved to dig his way out of his shameful state, to reshape himself into the kind of man who merited respect.
The kind of man who could eventually be worthy of a girl like Constance Stonewell.
But maybe he’d also resented her, for being what he could not have. And maybe that had been unfair of him. Maybe it had made him childish, at a time when she’d needed him to be the older, wiser soul.
“I didn’t disapprove of you, Constance,” he said, navigating around the dryness that had overtaken his throat. “In fact, I thought you disapproved of me. You seemed a bit—”
“Dismissive?” she offered. “Taunting?” She sighed and leaned back into the cushions, looking at the fire. “For such a legendary letch, Lord Apthorp, one wonders if you understand the simplest things about young women. I did not behave that way because I didn’t like you. I behaved that way because I wanted you to notice me.”
“I see,” he said, blowing out a breath because he instantly did see, now that she had pointed out the obvious. He dearly wished he could go back in time and kick his oversensitive, underobservant younger self in the shins.
“Forgive me. I simply thought … well, and then it seemed you had taken a fancy to Lord Harlan Stoke, and I did not wish to—”
He did not know how to go on, because he was not sure what exactly had happened in the picture gallery, only that she had very clearly wished for him to leave her there when he’d walked in on it.
“Now that I know the way you conduct yourself on Wednesdays,” she said meaningfully, “I think it is unfair of you to hold me in low esteem for what happened in the gallery.”
“Constance, I don’t.”
Her mouth was grim. “No? Your manner has always suggested that you thought I had allowed him improper liberties. And I didn’t.”
He turned toward her, so his face would be out of the shadows from the fireplace. He wanted her to see that he was being fully honest. “I wouldn’t care if you had taken liberties with him, or with any other gentleman. I merely took your seeming attachment to him as confirmation that you would not welcome my interest. And so I didn’t extend it. Even if I wanted to.”