Chapter 17 #2
“Yes. I just…oh, I’ll just tell you, I need to tell you.”
She seemed to be talking to herself. She motioned to the settee and they took their place there together. She downed half her whisky in a gulp and then set the glass aside. Now her full attention was on him.
He took her hands. “You’re starting to frighten me. What do you need to tell me that makes you so pale?”
“I bumped into Simone Stanhope at my dressmaker’s shop,” she began. “And she told me…she told me that Southwater and your wife were turned away, very publicly, from an assembly and they had an argument afterward, right in the street.”
He felt his eyes widen at that unexpected news and the wave of righteous triumph that rolled through him. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Christ, they must have both been humiliated. What a farce.”
She didn’t respond, but stared at her drink. His laughter faded and he thought of Honora’s unexpected approach to him at his solicitor’s. “That’s why she wants to talk to me,” he murmured.
Evelina did lift her gaze then. “What? Who wants to talk to you? Your wife?”
He flinched. “She won’t be my wife in a fortnight, according to the solicitor. But yes. She sent her sister as an emissary and I’ve agreed to see Florence tomorrow.”
Evelina’s expression went entirely blank at that statement. An erasing that he realized was something she rarely did with him. “I see,” she said softly. “And you think it has something to do with this new societal rejection?”
“I think the timing is suspect, yes,” he said, and leaned back on the settee, draping his arm along the back. “You must have felt a thrill hearing the news, knowing the two of them are sitting in their misery.”
She was very quiet for what felt like a lifetime and then she met his gaze. “No,” she said quietly but firmly.
He wrinkled his brow. “No? Truly?”
She shook her head. “Simone said those words and I waited for that feeling, but there was nothing. I didn’t care if they were hurt or happy. And I realized I had no further interest in causing them discomfort. I just felt…I’m tired, Vaughn.”
He shifted. “If you’d like we could retire early.”
“Not physically tired.” She got up and paced away from him and he felt every inch of that distance like it was a mile. “I’m tired of staying angry. I’m tired of tailoring my life and our time together toward how it will play to them. I just want to let it go.”
He followed her to his feet as a flash of pure, powerful panic accosted him. “What does that mean?”
“You know what I mean!” Her voice elevated slightly and her fists tightened at her sides. “Following them, making sure they see us, doing whatever we can to…to tweak them. I can’t do that anymore.”
He tried desperately to get enough breath in his lungs as this statement crashed through him.
He was shaking and he realized it wasn’t because he wanted to continue to harm Southwater and Florence anymore.
It was because his arrangement with Evelina had been built entirely on that. If she ended that, she ended this.
“So what does that mean for us?” he asked, wishing his voice didn’t shake like his hands. “Do you not want to be with me anymore?”
The tears in her eyes were obvious for a brief moment before she blinked them away. “Am I with you, Vaughn?”
He said nothing. He couldn’t. That question had erased his ability to speak. To think. To do anything but spiral into all the answers, the good and the bad. The lies and the truths that had been built in such a short, but intense time.
“I see,” he said at last, trying to overcome the sense of loss that he shouldn’t feel with this woman. Equally unable to cross the gulf that now seemed to stretch between them. Was that even possible given what they’d built this attachment on?
She shook her head and finished her whisky. “I think I ought to go. I think you want me to. Or need me to.”
Every fiber in Vaughn’s being screamed at him to stop her. To ask her to stay. To tell her…God, what would he tell her? He couldn’t even sort out the cacophony in this own head, let alone put words to it that would make any sense.
So instead he inclined his head. “I’ll have my carriage take you home.”
Her lips pinched. “Thank you. Good day.”
Then she pivoted and left him in the parlor without a caress or another word. And when she was gone, what he realized was that everything felt terrible again in a way it hadn’t since her arrival in his life.
* * *
Arabella and Julia would still be at Julia’s new home, Evelina was certain of it. She worried her handkerchief in her hand as Vaughn’s carriage turned into the drive and kept working to remove her emotions from her face.
They would see them, of course. Both of them knew her too well. But she wasn’t going to blubber and make this more than it was. It couldn’t be more than it was.
She smiled at the footman who helped her down and thanked Vaughn’s driver before he departed the house, back to his master. She shivered as she was welcomed into the home by Julia’s new butler and taken through the bright and pretty halls into an equally lovely, if small, parlor.
Arabella and Julia were there, sitting before the fire, talking softly. When she was announced, they both looked up in surprise and then their smiles were instant as they came across the room to her.
“Gracious, I thought you weren’t coming!” Julia said as she embraced her.
“My—my schedule changed,” Evelina said.
Arabella also hugged her, but when she drew back there was a knowing expression. “What happened?”
That question broke through every barrier Evelina had fruitlessly tried to create and she leaned forward and rested her head on her sister’s shoulder. “I don’t even know.”
She was guided to the settee and there she told them everything that had happened that day, from seeing Simone, to hearing about the refusal of Southwater, to the fact that Vaughn would see his wife and how she’d told him she no longer wanted to use their affair as a weapon.
“And then…then I left,” she whispered. “And he didn’t stop me. So I suppose it is over now. Which makes sense, as it was only ever about revenge, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?” To her surprise, it was Julia who asked, not Arabella.
Evelina shrugged in response. “Sometimes it didn’t feel like it.”
“After you brought sex into the equation, you mean?” Arabella pressed lightly.
Evelina shifted. That would be the easy answer, wouldn’t it? Passion had clouded judgment and that was the depth of it. Only it wasn’t true. She knew it.
“It was the first change,” she murmured. “But it was more than that. It was the times when we simply…existed together. Read books or talked or shared secrets.” She shivered. “It changed when I realized how much I wanted to protect him.”
She thought of Matilda’s rumor about Lady Blackburn’s pregnancy once more.
“Protect him?” Arabella repeated. “Oh, Evie.”
“Don’t say my name like that.” Evelina got up and strode away from her sisters, trying to get enough breath in her lungs and feeling like it failed.
“It’s obvious you have feelings, true feelings, for this man,” Julia said. “It was patently clear the night we all had supper together and this only verifies that observation.”
“No.” Evelina clenched her fists in and out at her sides but the tingling anxiety ripping through her didn’t ease. “I’m not that foolish to do such a thing twice.”
“It’s not the same,” Arabella snapped, and got to her feet. “He isn’t the same.”
“Oh, you’re no judge, not anymore!” Evelina said. “You fell in love and it worked for you.”
“Love,” Arabella repeated. “Are we comparing love?”
Evelina tried to open her mouth and refute that charge.
Only when it was said out loud, when the question hung in the air before her, the answer felt too clear.
But she didn’t want to love again. She certainly didn’t want to love Vaughn.
He was so caught up in the betrayals that had been performed against him, there was no doubt in her mind that he still cared for his wife.
Even if he didn’t, he had made Evie no promises. He wouldn’t want her love.
And it would only crush her in the long term, wouldn’t it? Tear her apart, only on a much grander scheme than she had experienced so recently with Harry because Vaughn felt…different.
“I cannot discuss this,” she finally whispered. “Please don’t make me discuss this. None of it matters. He let me walk away.”
Arabella’s expression softened. “Very well. We’ll leave it. But an argument doesn’t mean an ending, you know. And we’ll face whatever comes together, just as we always do.”
Julia linked an arm through Evelina’s. “Yes. Always.”
Evelina sighed and this time there was comfort she hadn’t been able to find until that moment. “Please, won’t you just show me your house and tell me all about how good your new protector is in bed…oh, what is his name?”
“Laurence,” Julia said with a shake of her head. “Lord Castleton, if you want to be formal about it.”
“Castleton,” Evelina said, and hoped it would stick this time. “Let me just be Evelina again, not the jilted former mistress of the Duke of Southwater or the unwanted co-conspirator of the Earl of Blackburn.”
“We can easily do that,” Arabella said, and brought her back to the settee. “First, Julia, you must tell Evie what you were saying to be before she got here. About the jewels!”
Her sister giggled, and as they put their heads together as they so often had over their years as courtesans, Evie felt a calm come over her. But it wasn’t quite enough to make her forget that she had no idea where she stood with Vaughn.
And a sneaking suspicion that love was the word that fit the ache in her heart when she thought of him.