Chapter 27
They broke apart slowly, reluctantly, as though some invisible thread still connected them, and neither was quite willing to be the one to sever it.
It felt cosmic, raw, primal. As much a part of his own breathing.
Anna’s breath came unsteady against his chest, her hand curled into the front of his shirt, and for one suspended moment Frederick allowed himself to simply rest his forehead against hers and breathe.
Then the carriage gave a particular lurch and slowed, and through the window Frederick caught the familiar shape of her townhouse steps emerging out of the dark, and the spell, whatever it had been, began very quietly to unravel.
“We are here,” he said flatly.
Anna drew back first, back into her seat, properly.
She straightened with a small, indrawn breath, and her hands went immediately to her own disordered appearance.
While her skirts were back down, one glove was half off, a curl loose from its pin and falling against her throat.
His coat was slipping from her shoulder where she’d forgotten she was wearing it at all.
“Here.” Frederick’s voice came out lower than he intended.
He reached out to settle the coat properly back into place, his knuckles brushing the bare skin of her shoulder as he did, and felt her go very still beneath the touch.
“Your—” He gestured vaguely at the loose curl, not quite trusting his hand to be steady enough to fix it himself.
Despite all that he had just shown her, and the throbbing hardness of him, he felt nervous now.
She tucked it back with a small, distracted motion, not quite meeting his eyes, and the carriage rolled to a final stop outside her door.
The silence stretched, filled only with the stamp and shift of the horses outside and the distant clatter of the city beyond, and Frederick watched Anna’s face in the dim lamplight. He watched something working behind her eyes that he could not read and was suddenly, urgently afraid of.
“Frederick.” She said his name quietly, and there was something careful in it, something that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago when she’d all but screamed it to the Heavens.
“What you told me. Last year. That you didn’t wish to marry.
” She paused, and he watched her gather the courage for the rest of it, watched her chin lift the way it always did when she was bracing herself for something. “Does that…”
“Does that what?”
I know what she means to ask.
“Does that still stand?”
He had known the question was coming. He had known it from the moment the carriage began to slow, had felt it gathering in the air between them like weather, and still it landed hard on his chest.
He looked at her, really looked at the beautiful creature in front of him.
She was trying so hard not to let it show on her face and failing entirely to hide, at the curl she had only just tucked back beginning to slip loose again, at everything in her that had leaned into him not ten minutes ago as though he were the only safe harbor in the whole of London.
And yet, he felt something in himself go to a place where he always had: he would always be Rachel’s protector. A man like him, with his father’s blood running through his veins, was never meant to marry anyone. Even though he’d made it his life’s work to be nothing like him.
“Yes,” he said. “It still stands.”
The words landed between them and seemed to take up all the air in the carriage. Anna’s face did not crumple, did not do any of the things he half expected and would almost have preferred, because at least those things would have given him somewhere to direct his own wretchedness.
Instead, it went very still, very careful, the particular stillness of a person working hard to arrange their features into something presentable before the alternative could escape. She was so strong; she could do better than him. And she would. No woman like her could remain unwed for long.
“I see,” she said, and that was that.
“Anna…” He stammered as he reached for her hand without entirely meaning to, and she did not pull away, but she did not curl her fingers into his either, and the lack of it was its own small, terrible answer.
“I should not have done this. Tonight, I let myself… It was unfair of me to allow it, unfair to you most of all, and I am sorry. Profoundly sorry. After all you have been through, after your… friendship. It will not happen again.”
“Won’t it?” Her voice was very even.
“I have no intention of marrying, Anna. I never have. You know this about me. You have known it longer than almost anyone.” He was talking too fast now; he could hear himself doing it and could not seem to stop, the words tumbling out ahead of whatever sense might have governed them.
“You deserve a man who can offer you everything you’re looking for.
A husband. A family. I am not that man.”
Anna was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice had gone soft in a way that frightened him considerably more than anger would have. He hated the idea that he was the source of her pain.
“You needn’t explain so thoroughly, Frederick.”
“Anna, please—”
“No, truly.” A small, humorless laugh escaped her, directed entirely at herself. “I am only annoyed with my own foolishness. I knew what you’d told me. I have known it for a year.”
“It is not so simple—”
“I let myself hope anyway, like an utter fool, that perhaps you’d changed your mind. That perhaps I had changed it for you.”
“Anna, please—”
“I am not angry with you.” She withdrew her hand from his at last, gently, with a finality that hurt more than if she’d snatched it away. “You have been honest with me. The fault is entirely my own.”
“You had every reason,” he said, low and miserable, though he could not have said what he meant by it, only that it felt unbearable to let her believe the wanting had been hers alone.
She looked at him then, something flickering across her face too quickly for him to name it before she mastered it again.
“Don’t,” she said quietly. “Please don’t say things like that and then tell me in the same breath that nothing can come of them. It is not kind, Frederick, even if you don’t intend it unkindly.”
He had no answer to that. He sat with the truth of it lodged somewhere beneath his ribs, knowing she was right and hating himself considerably for the knowing. He ran his hands through his hair and stifled a curse.
Maintain your control, damn it.
“Goodnight, Frederick.” Anna reached for the door handle before he could move to assist her, before he could find any words at all to keep her those last few seconds longer.
She stepped down onto the pavement with her chin lifted and her spine very straight, every inch the composed lady she had been raised to be, betrayed only by the faint unsteadiness of her hand as she gathered her skirts.
“Anna.” He came to the door after her, one hand braced against the frame. “Let me at least see you to your door—”
“That won’t be necessary.” She did not turn around. “Thank you for tonight. Goodnight, Your Grace.”
She climbed the steps without looking back, and a moment later the door of her townhouse opened.
She was swallowed into the warm light of the front hall, and the door closed, leaving Frederick standing alone on the cold pavement with his coat missing.
It was forgotten, still, about her soft shoulders.
He was hit with an unmistakable, sinking certainty.
I have just done something I am going to regret, and for a very long time.
He did not, in the end, find a hackney back to the ball, not at first. Instead, he sat in the quiet dark street outside her house for longer than he could account for.
He looked up at the window, and after a moment a light appeared in it. He saw a candle carried by some unseen hand, throwing a warm square of gold out onto the cold street below.
He sat out on the street, watching it with the helplessness of a man who knows he has no right to be where he is and cannot make himself leave.
She is going to find someone else. The thought arrived with the flat, pitiless quality of simple fact.
She came to London for exactly that purpose, and she will succeed at it, because she succeeds at everything she puts her mind to.
In fact, by this time next year she will be in some other man’s house with some other man’s name, and I will have given her up for a principle I cannot even defend to myself at eleven o’clock on a cold street with her light in my eyes and the smell of her hair still on my collar.
The candle in the window moved, carried away into some inner room, and the square of gold disappeared, and the street went dark again.
Frederick looked at the blank window for a moment longer.
Then, he walked off in search of a hackney to take him home.