Chapter 14
Adrian was still among the ledgers when Honoria found him, the house gone quiet around them both in the late afternoon sun that shone through the lattice window.
She looked, he thought, as though she had not slept. There was something worn about her that evening that hadn’t been there a week ago, a tiredness held carefully behind her beauty and composure.
He was glad of her all the same, glad enough that he did not ask what had put it there. He had learned, these past weeks, that some questions she would answer and some she would only turn aside, and he had grown careful about which he spent. He had seen so little of her.
Instead, he had been hunting Mr. Coombe’s hand through the accounts all week, page by page, and had strayed tonight, without quite meaning to, into the older volumes.
Four full years back. Beneath the ledgers themselves, tucked where he must have put them himself in some fog he no longer clearly remembered, he’d found papers in his father’s handwriting.
He had not let himself look at them since the year they were written. They lay open on the desk now, the past spread across the blotter in his father’s careful, old-fashioned hand. If he could admit such things to himself, he would admit that he missed him.
Nell did not ask what they were. She had learned that too. He liked that about her almost as much as her ocean eyes.
She crossed to the sideboard and poured them each a glass of sherry. She sat and talked of Cassandra.
“She walked the cliff path this afternoon—”
“I beg your pardon, she walked what?”
“Yes, she truly did walk the cliff path. She was on the side nearest to land, and we took it very slow.”
“Are you sure that is wise with her condition?
“She is ready and stronger than she seems. She did not once reach for an arm to steady her. Three full minutes on her feet in open air with nothing but the wind to unsettle her.”
“Quite a feat,” he said as he took a sip. “That is good news, and I must say that I am impressed. It seems like a lot is changing very fast, but she has always been stronger than she realizes. Thank you…for helping her.”
“It is a great pleasure to do so.”
“I have good news as well.”
“Oh?”
He spoke of business in Truro then, which he told her was settled now, that they would all go to the assembly next month as a family, Tristan and Cassandra and the two of them besides. Something in her went stiff at that comment.
“Cassandra asked, her whole face lit with the asking,” he explained, and the man who had weighed every choice set before him for four years with grim, exhausting care had simply given way, because he wanted, more than he wanted to be prudent, to see her happy.
“I am tired of saying no, so I said yes.”
He noticed the lapse in himself even as he described it to Nell, and found, turning it over, that he could not bring himself to mind it.
“I think that is a wise decision,” she said with a small smile that made his heartbeat quicken. “You have good judgment.”
“Do I? And how does one acquire good judgment?” He said as he leaned closer, his eyes hot and focused on her
“Experience,” she said and she arched her shoulders back, and he noticed just how beautiful she was in such a position.
“And how does one get experience in such matters?”
“Poor decisions.”
The same lapse came over him, and he laughed outright and not of consequence. Genuinely, without calculation, the sound of it strange in his own ears.
He understood, watching her face change at the sound of it, that she had done that. Honoria had made him laugh, unguarded, twice now in as many weeks, when he could not have named the last person before her who’d managed it even once.
He found, sitting there with the sherry and the candle and his father’s old letters forgotten on the desk between them, that he wanted to tell her the worst of himself.
“If you made me laugh, I suppose it is my turn…to not make you cry exactly, but to share something…to bring balance. I have made my fair share of poor decisions…”
As the last of the words left him, he thought of making another poor decision.
As if reading his mind, she walked toward him, her hips swaying and her eyes focused on his.
She closed the distance until she was standing directly in front of him, her eyes locked unblinkingly onto his.
She did not recoil. She did not pull away.
He watched her stay, watched the sharp guard on her features dissolve.
Caught in the gravity of her pull, he leaned down, erasing the last lingering inch between their lips.
He parted them, ready to take her lips with his own, to do what he had always wanted to do.
And then she stepped back. Only slightly. Only enough. The message was clear.
“I’m sorry,” she said too quickly, her face already conveying everything he needed to know. “I must rest before Cassandra’s exercises in the morning.”
And then she was at the door, and then she was gone, and the confession he’d been a half-breath from making, his truest confession, sat unspoken in the room with only him left to hold it in his lungs.
He sat a long while after, the wine gone warm and untouched in his glass. He caught a glimpse of himself in the gilded mirror across the room and did not recognize the man he had become over the course of one evening. Reaching for a woman.
Yielding to wants of others that he’d have crushed without a second thought a month ago.
Confessing the one thing he had guarded for four years against Tristan’s questions, against his sister’s grief, against his own solitary nights, ready to hand it over to a woman he had married for nothing more than a settlement.
My marriage.
The marriage he had arranged so coldly, so entirely without feeling, had done something to him he had never arranged for at all. It was beginning to change him. And what about her?
She had grown close to him, closer than he let anyone come, and then slipped away at the last possible moment, every time.
Something is wrong with her and not just that she married me.
He was certain of it now in a way he had only suspected before. He’d thought of looking into it and only pushed the thought away. He knew it watching her at the Trevanions’ table, watching her hands over an injured man’s leg, watching her hesitate, always, a half-beat before her own name.
I will find out just what my wife is hiding.