Chapter 14 #3
He had made it clear that they were only to be cordial.
Cordial. She clenched her jaw.
“Emily,” he called her gently.
She looked up instinctively.
He had formed a habit of calling her like that whenever he wanted her to bend to his will, and it worked. She just realized in that moment that it worked.
Theodore was charming her. She could not let that happen.
“I am not upset with you,” she said.
“You are something,” he said.
She looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are something with me,” he said. “I cannot tell you exactly what, but it is not nothing and it is not nothing in a way that has been going on since last Tuesday and I would like to know what it is.”
Emily set down the flower she had been holding. She walked over and sat on the edge of the stone bench, smoothing her skirts with a sudden, sharp focus before looking up at him. “Would you like to sit?”
Theodore didn’t hesitate. He walked over to her and sat down by her side, turning his body sideways, so that he was facing her.
“What should I have expected?” she asked. “From the honeymoon.”
Theodore’s brows shot up toward his hairline, a look of genuine bewilderment crossing his face. “I don’t understand.”
“I am not being unreasonable,” she said immediately.
“I am not demanding anything you are not prepared to give. I am in no position to demand anything, and I know that.” She folded her hands in her lap.
“In fact, I did not have any expectations. But I figured, since we went through with the marriage and you turned out to be nothing like I...” she stopped herself and swallowed.
“I just thought that we would simply spend some time together. That we would talk. That perhaps we would eat a meal in the same room occasionally.” She looked at him.
“It is a huge house, and it echoes. I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen you in the past two weeks.”
Theodore looked at her. “I have invited you to tea and dinner,” he said. “Four times.”
Emily looked at him. “I invited you first. You declined my invitations.”
“You declined mine.”
Theodore opened his mouth. He closed it, then looked at the roses.
“ Is this some kind of contest?” he said.
“Are we doing a contest? Because I have to tell you, Emily, I do not know what is happening right now. I came to this garden to ask if you were upset with me, and somehow we have arrived at a conversation about competitive dinner invitations, and I am not entirely sure how.”
Emily opened her mouth but didn’t say a word.
She let out a frustrated groan, dropping her face into her hands for a fleeting second.
She was complicating things; she knew it.
She didn't even know why she had asked the question.
Two weeks ago, she couldn't stand the sound of his voice, yet here she was, picking a fight because he wasn't around enough to annoy her.
What had changed? Why was she suddenly so hungry for the presence of a man she had spent months trying to avoid?
She had sat across from him at dinner tables and found him exasperating.
She had stood in ballrooms and watched him charm every person in the room and felt nothing but mild irritation.
She had come to Faithcourt with a plan that required him specifically because of his name and his standing, and she had not once factored in the possibility that she would find herself sitting in his garden wanting to know what his childhood had been like.
“Never mind,” she said. She stood. “Forget I asked. It was a foolish question, and I do not know why I —”
She turned to flee back toward the house, but Theodore’s hand shot out. His hand closed around her wrist before she had taken a full step, warm, and she stilled immediately, the way she always stilled when he did this, as though her body had made a decision her mind had not yet caught up with.
“Sit down, Emily,” he said.
Emily obliged immediately, her legs feeling strangely heavy as she sank back onto the stone bench. She looked at him, her heart doing a nervous little dance.
“I do not know how to do this either,” he said. “In case that was not clear. I have never been married before, and I have spent the better part of my adult life specifically avoiding the possibility, so I am not coming to this with any particular expertise.” He paused. “But I have been thinking.”
Emily said nothing. She was listening.
“There were things I thought about you,” he said.
“When we were in London. When we used to argue a lot, and you would look at me as though I was a problem someone had left in your way.” The corner of his mouth moved.
“Things I decided about you before I knew you. That you were rigid. That you were cold. That you had decided exactly what everything was going to be and were not interested in being shown otherwise.”
Emily looked at him steadily.
“I was wrong about most of it,” he said simply. “I have seen you with Frederick. I have seen you in this house. I have listened to you talk. I still think about our conversation in the library that day before Julia...” He paused. “You are not what I thought you were, Emily.”
The garden was very quiet around them.
“I am sure you came into this marriage,” he continued.
“With your own ideas about what it was. That we would both fulfill our responsibilities and keep a respectful distance, and that would be the whole of it.” He looked at her.
“Perhaps you told yourself that was fine because you had already decided that love was not something this marriage was going to contain, and you were at peace with that.” He tilted his head.
“We are on the same page there. I want you to know that. I am not going to complicate things by pretending otherwise.”
Emily felt something move through her chest.
“But...” he said. “...that does not mean we cannot have something good. Something real.” He leaned forward slightly, his elbows on his knees, looking at the roses rather than at her, which somehow made it easier to hear.
“Frederick is going to grow up in this house. He is going to watch us every day and learn from what he sees. I would like what he sees to be two people who actually... like each other.” He glanced at her sideways.
“Which I think, against considerable odds and both our better judgments, we are beginning to do.”
Emily looked at her hands. She did not say anything.
“So,” he said, straightening. “I am proposing that we put all the rest of it aside. The arrangement and the expectations and the competitive dinner invitations.” He looked at her directly.
“We have a few days of honeymoon left. We are going to eat together every day with Frederick. It doesn’t matter if we argue for most of it.
Tomorrow I am going to ask the cook to prepare a picnic, and we are going to take Frederick to the south garden and do something that has nothing to do with estate accounts or household responsibilities.
” He paused. “Does that seem reasonable to you?”
Emily looked at him. At the straightforwardness of him, the complete absence of performance in it, a man simply saying what he meant and meaning what he said.
She felt the last of the tension she had been carrying since the corridor outside Frederick's room settle quietly and release.
“I would like that very much,” she said.
He looked at her. “Good,” he said.
They sat in the rose garden for a while longer, not saying very much, and it was the most comfortable either of them had been in two weeks. Neither of them remarked on it. Emily thought that this would do. She was content with this.
She was glad that she had been wrong about how marriage to a man like Theodore Merrick would turn out.