Chapter 13 Rescue and Confession #2
“That sounds very stirring, but it does not change the fact that any move you make against him becomes a scandal. Your sister’s reputation. Your estates. Your political alliances. Your very proper, very horrible fiancée.”
“Do not protect me from the consequences of protecting you.”
The words strike somewhere soft.
I look down at my hands. One glove is torn. There is dirt beneath the nail of my thumb. I focus on that because if I look at him, I will say something reckless.
He kneels in front of me.
This is unfair. Dukes should not kneel. It destabilizes the social order and my already questionable decision-making.
“Emma,” he says, “look at me.”
I do.
Regret sits in his face, naked and terrible.
“I failed you today.”
“No.”
“I did.”
“James, unless you secretly moonlight as three thugs in bad hats, you did not.”
His mouth flinches. Not a smile. Almost.
“I knew Thornbury was angry,” he says. “I knew Hartwick disliked your influence. I knew society was sharpening itself against you, and still I allowed distance between us because I thought restraint honorable.”
Beatrice rises quietly. “I shall see whether Mrs. Finch has the broth ready.”
“Beatrice—”
She pauses at the door, eyes wet but steady. “The door will remain open. I shall be directly outside. If either of you does anything exceptionally foolish, kindly do it quietly enough that I may pretend ignorance.”
Then she leaves.
The door remains open.
Technically.
James does not move.
Neither do I.
The air between us becomes a living thing.
“I cannot bear this,” he says.
My heart trips. “The scandal?”
“You hurt. You frightened. You believing yourself alone because I have been too proud, too bound, too careful to say what should have been said weeks ago.”
His confession strips the air from my lungs.
“James.”
“I love you.”
The words do not arrive like thunder.
They arrive quietly. Clearly. Like a diagnosis finally named.
I have imagined him saying it. Of course I have. Usually at humiliating hours, when sleep would not come and my brain decided to be both poet and enemy. In every imagined version, I was clever. Composed. Devastatingly graceful.
In reality, my eyes fill with tears so fast the room blurs.
“That is very inconvenient,” I whisper.
His expression breaks.
“Yes.”
“You’re engaged.”
“Yes.”
“I have no dowry, no birth, no legal existence, and a growing list of men who want me silenced.”
“Yes.”
“This is a terrible idea.”
“Undoubtedly.”
I laugh once, and it hurts my ribs. The laugh becomes something dangerously close to a sob.
James reaches for my hand, then stops, still asking. Always asking, even now.
I put my hand in his.
“I love you too,” I say.
There. The cliff. The fall.
His fingers close around mine as if the words have physically struck him.
For a moment, we simply stare at each other. Two people in a room too full of impossible things: bloodied linen, open door, broken rules, a future that has refused to stay dead.
Then he rises, and I do too because pain has lost jurisdiction over my body.
“Careful,” he says.
“Bossy.”
“Injured.”
“Still bossy.”
He makes a sound low in his throat and touches my unbruised cheek.
The kiss is not careful.
It starts that way. A question. A breath. His mouth brushing mine with restraint so exquisite it nearly kills me.
Then I lean into him.
His control breaks.
He kisses me like he has been starving politely for weeks. One hand cradles the back of my head, careful of the bruise; the other settles at my waist, not pulling where my ribs hurt, just holding me as if the world might try to take me again.
I forget the room. The open door. Thornbury. Hartwick. Every miserable rule that says my body belongs to history’s paperwork.
There is only James, warm and shaking, his breath catching when I grip his shirt, the thud of his heart under my palm.
He turns us, and for one wild second I think he means to lower me to the bed.
Then he stops.
Completely.
His forehead rests against mine. His breathing is ragged.
“Not like this,” he says.
The words take a second to make sense.
Then they do, and humiliation burns hot enough to compete with the bruises.
I pull back. “Right. Of course.”
His hand catches mine. “No. Do not retreat from me. Please.”
I hate the please.
It works.
“I am bound to another,” he says, voice rough. “Not in my heart. Never there. But in law, in society, in obligation. I will not take from you one more thing this world can use against you.”
My anger folds in on itself.
That is the problem with honorable men. Sometimes they are correct at deeply annoying moments.
“I hate this century,” I say.
His gaze searches my face. “Because it is not yours.”
Every part of me goes cold.
James does not look triumphant. He looks afraid.
“Your clothes,” he says. “The scar no surgeon I know could have made. The things you understand before any man in the room has named the danger. You speak of America as a story learned for an examination, and sometimes you look at London as if you are grieving it before it has happened.” His thumb rests against my cheek, warm and steady. “Tell me the truth.”
The open door remains behind him. Beatrice waits somewhere beyond it. The whole house breathes around us, ordinary and impossible.
So I tell him.
Not elegantly. There is no elegant way to explain a research laboratory, a machine built to bend time, or my mother’s hand being torn from mine by a hole in the world.
I tell him I was training in medicine in a century where women enter hospitals through the front door and children are taught how to save someone who is choking.
I tell him I woke in the watch-house nearly three hundred years before I was born.
He listens without interruption. That frightens me more than disbelief would.
When I finish, his face has gone pale.
“Your mother,” he says at last. “She is alive.”
The word cuts cleanly. “I hope so.”
“And you cannot return to her?”
“I don’t know how. I don’t even know if there is a way.”
His eyes close for one brief moment. When they open, grief has joined the fear—not for an absurd story, but for me.
“You believe me,” I whisper.
“I have watched you perform the impossible since the night I found you,” he says. “This is merely the first explanation large enough to contain you.”
A laugh breaks out of me, wet and unsteady.
“I still hate this century.”
“As do I, frequently.”
“I also hate that you’re right.”
“A first for both of us, perhaps.”
The laugh escapes before I can stop it, small and painful and real.
He touches my cheek again. “I will end the engagement.”
Hope is dangerous.
I know this. I have charts. I have evidence.
Still, there it is.
“Hartwick will not let you walk away.”
“Then I will give him reason to prefer it.”
My stomach drops.
Victoria.
“James.”
His eyes sharpen. “You said she is with child.”
I nod.
“And Harrow?”
“Captain Julian Harrow. Beatrice found a note. I noticed signs. I confronted her. She admitted enough.”
Pain moves across his face. Not heartbreak, exactly. Victoria has not owned his heart. But betrayal has many flavors. This one tastes like humiliation, entrapment, and the sick realization that a life you accepted as duty was being built on fraud.
“She meant to name the child mine,” he says.
“Yes.”
He closes his eyes.
I want to soften it. I cannot.
“I am sorry.”
He opens them. “For what? Not carrying another woman’s lie in silence?”
“For being the person who has to tell you.”
His expression gentles. “Emma.”
I hate that my name in his voice can undo me faster than fear.
He draws a breath, visibly steadying himself. “We need proof.”
“Yes.”
“The note.”
“I have it hidden.”
“Good. We will confirm Harrow’s movements. Servants talk. Grooms talk more. If Hartwick is presented with evidence of Thornbury’s attack, Victoria’s condition, and Harrow’s connection, he may choose quiet dissolution over ruin.”
“That is a lot of faith in a poisonous old tyrant’s self-interest.”
“It is the only faith I have in him.”
Fair.
The practicality helps. Plans are emotional tourniquets. They do not heal, but they keep you from bleeding everywhere while you decide what comes next.
James lifts my hand and presses his lips to my knuckles. Nothing like the kiss before. This is solemn. A vow wearing skin.
“Wait for me,” he says.
My chest hurts, and not from the ribs.
“I am currently concussed, bruised, and trapped in your guest room. My options are limited.”
“Emma.”
I swallow.
There is fear in his eyes. Not of Hartwick. Not of Thornbury. Of losing me to Weston, to scandal, to time itself.
“I’ll wait,” I whisper.
Relief moves through him so sharply it almost hurts to watch.
Footsteps sound in the corridor. Beatrice appears with Mrs. Finch, broth, and the expression of a woman who has absolutely been eavesdropping for my own good.
“You are to drink this,” Mrs. Finch announces.
“Is it medicinal or punitive?”
“Both, miss.”
James steps back, but not far. Never far enough to make the room feel empty.
* * *
Morning arrives with bruises that have developed artistic ambitions.
My left cheek is purple. My ribs object to breathing, laughing, standing, sitting, and existing. Mrs. Finch has banned visitors, stairs, and “agitation,” which means she has never met my life.
Beatrice sits by the window with embroidery she is not doing. James has been gone since dawn, pursuing proof with the cold precision of a man who has found a socially acceptable outlet for rage.
I am halfway through arguing that coffee would improve my recovery when Molly bursts in without knocking.
Her face is bright with panic.
“Miss Emma,” she says, then looks at Beatrice. “My lady. Begging pardon, but it is all over the servants’ hall.”
Beatrice stands. “What is?”
Molly wrings her hands. “Lord Weston. He has told half of London he and Miss Hartford are engaged.”
The room tilts.
For one second, all I hear is James’s voice from last night.
Wait for me.
Then the future, being a petty little monster, smiles and moves the ground beneath my feet.