She huddled back into the corner of the vestibule, realizing she had made a terrible mistake. After their moment in her cousin’s parlor with the roses, she had somehow allowed herself to think of Apthorp not as a man she had wronged, but as her ally. A man whose fortunes were entwined with her own.
He wasn’t.
What he felt for her was a loathing so thick it made him hoarse.
Suddenly, she hated him. “Can I understand what it feels like to be scandalous and unwanted and alone?” she repeated. “Actually, I know quite well what it is like to live in exile because one’s relatives believe it is in one’s best interest. It’s so lonesome that I would do nearly anything to avoid experiencing it again. And yet I’m welcoming that very thing for you and still you reproach me.”
“Constance—” he said quietly, his eyes hooded, but she did not care to hear his opinion on this matter. She’d heard quite enough of his opinions.
“You have always believed I am an overindulged, frivolous creature who could never fathom pain or sadness. You persist in believing this even as I give up everything I care about to save your reputation.”
She was so upset her voice shook, and she hated it.
“Malign me all you like but don’t forget our success has not come about by accident, Julian. I spend my nights plotting your social engagements and writing letters to hacks eliciting support for your bill. I have planned your political dinners, your engagement ball, your bloody wedding. I’m exhausted, because I can’t sleep for dreaming about you and—”
He put two hands on her shoulders. “Constance.”
“Do not touch me,” she rasped. She wrenched around his body to the heavy doors and stepped out into the storm. Her coachman, seeing her, leapt out into the hailstorm to retrieve her.
“Wait,” Julian called raggedly, following her onto the street.
But she had had enough of repeating the same story over and over, expecting a different ending.
Their story would end like this. Without a backward glance.
Chapter 12
I want you to touch me.
The hands that were always just out of reach of the place she so fervently wanted them to go swept over her. Soft and masculine and knowing, brushing down over her stomach to her hip bone, teasing her skin. She lifted herself toward him, into the heat that was never as close as she wanted it.
I want you to touch me.
Softly, softly, his hands slid lower. Yes. Please. There.
Thump.
Someone at the door. The hands retreated. No, don’t go, let them knock. Come back.
Constance opened her eyes, as usual, to darkness and the feeling of wanting.
Thump.
She groaned. The insistent knocking was coming not from her door but from her window, like a branch had fallen from the tree in last night’s storm and decided to amuse itself by beating her awake from a dream that had seemed so, so close to finally delivering some blessed relief.
Which was appropriate, given the whole world seemed to be conspiring to make her as wretched as a cat in a river.
Thump.
She dragged herself out of bed and stomped to the window, prepared to give the insolent branch a beating of her own. She yanked open the curtains to find that the window was being assaulted not by a tree but by a man.
An unusually handsome one, who was rain-soaked and bedraggled, as though he had tromped halfway across the city in the drizzle at an hour that barely qualified as dawn to creep into the Rosecrofts’ garden and thrash at her shutters while she dreamt about him.
“Apthorp?” she hissed. “What are you doing here?”
“I have a key to the mews.”
“Yes, but why are you attempting to break into my room in the middle of the night?”
He looked at her from below his lashes. “I need to apologize. For what I said to you.”
Her heart constricted more than she liked at the sadness in his eyes, so she crossed her arms and took an insolent tone. “I prefer my apologies to occur after sunrise.”
“I couldn’t wait. I’ve been up all night, turning it around in my head. May I please come in?”
“No. If you are caught in my rooms, you will be forced to marry me at once, which will make ending our engagement impossible.”
“That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to end it. I want to marry you.”
He said this with all the enthusiasm with which he might announce he wished to be buried at sea when he died young of plague.
“Oh, dear God,” she muttered. She turned, walked directly back to her bed, threw herself upon it, and drew the bed-curtains around her for good measure.
She heard him clambering through the window and laughed bitterly to herself, for making hysterical scenes before dawn was really more in line with her sensibilities than his. Her love for theater must be rubbing off on him.
“Constance?” he said in a low, ragged voice. “Would you please come out? I’ve been up half the night thinking this over, and I can’t do this anymore.”
He pulled the bed-curtains open and sank to his knees. He took her hands in his, and looked into her eyes with an impossibly tragic expression. “Please marry me.”
To think that mere minutes before, she had imagined those same hands doing all sorts of unspeakable things to her. She would, in fact, prefer that they do unspeakable things to her than clutch at her while he performed a guilt-induced offer of marriage.
“Why are you asking me this now?”
“Because of what you said. What you’re giving up. What my family will suffer. I’m asking far too much of all of you when there’s a simpler solution.”
“There is nothing simple about marriage.”
He leaned forward. “Constance,” he said, looking at her pitifully. “If we marry, you won’t have to leave. You won’t have to be alone.”
Her heart shriveled like a leech in salt. Of course that was why he was here.
In her moment of frustration she’d been weak. She should never have spoken of her loneliness to him. For now not only would he look at her like she was pathetic, as he was currently doing, but he would feel like a villain for letting her sacrifice her happiness for his. Given his need to regard himself as the most exemplary man who’d ever lived, he could not stand to think himself a villain. He would prefer to consign them both to a lifetime of misery and resentment.
She had accidentally built a trap. She had to set him free, lest he spend the rest of their lives torturing them both.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Apthorp,” she said in her coldest voice. “I would never marry if it were not for love. I don’t love you. And God knows you don’t love me.”
His face performed a series of somersaults, as though this assertion was somehow surprising or debatable.
“But, Constance,” he said quietly. “What if I did?”
He had never intended to say these words to her, but he was wet and tired and sad and now he couldn’t seem to stop them. “Constance, what if I told you that I’ve loved you all along? For years.”
It felt so good to finally say it, to admit it, after so long of hoarding it away that he couldn’t help but smile. He couldn’t stifle a small laugh. He felt such a pang of lightness and pleasure in finally saying the words aloud—in admitting, finally, the wrongheaded thing he wanted, even though it made no sense—that he half expected the sun to rise and the rain to clear and the room to fill with birdsong and pots of gold and unicorns and a fairy who might play a lute in the corner as they danced.