Chapter Eleven #2
“For you? Yes.” He tilted her face up to meet his eyes. “Only for you, Eliza. I have never…” He stopped, the words lodging in his throat.
I have never felt like this. I have never wanted anyone this way. I have never been in danger of throwing away everything I believed just to keep someone close.
“Never what?” she asked softly.
“Never mind.” He kissed her before she could press further, using his mouth to distract from the confession he had almost made. “Come. The bedroom is a better venue for what I have planned next.”
***
Later, much later, after he had reduced her to incoherence twice more and was lying beside her in the rumpled bed, watching the late afternoon light paint gold across her skin, she asked the question he had been dreading.
“What happens when the Season ends?”
His hand, which had been tracing idle patterns on her bare shoulder, went still.
“What do you mean?”
“The Season ends in six weeks.” She was not looking at him, her gaze fixed on the ceiling. “Our arrangement was for the Season. You said, when this ends, I could marry someone respectable. Someone like Mr Alcott.”
The name hit him like a physical blow.
Alcott.
He had forgotten about Edmund Alcott, or rather, had forced himself to forget. Had refused to think about the respectable man waiting in the wings, ready to sweep in and claim Eliza the moment William released her.
“Is that what you want?” His voice came out rougher than intended. “To marry Alcott?”
“I don’t know what I want.” She finally turned to look at him, and her brown eyes were troubled. “I know what I should want. A respectable husband. A stable future. A life that doesn’t involve sneaking away to a duke’s country house for illicit afternoons.”
“But?”
“But when I try to imagine it…” She hesitated. “When I try to imagine being some respectable gentleman’s wife, whether it is Mr Alcott or another man much like him, sharing his bed, bearing his children, I feel nothing. Less than nothing. A sort of grey emptiness that makes me want to weep.”
Something fierce and possessive roared to life in William’s chest.
“And when you imagine…” He could not complete the sentence. Could not ask when you imagine being mine, because he had never offered her that. Had explicitly told her he could not offer her that.
“When I imagine you?” Her smile was sad. “I feel everything. Too much. So much that it terrifies me.”
“Eliza.”
“I know.” She placed a finger over his lips, silencing him.
“I know you can’t. I’m not asking for anything you haven’t offered.
I’m simply…” She drew a shaky breath. “I’m trying to understand how I’m supposed to go back to a normal life after this.
After you. How I’m supposed to marry some respectable man and pretend I don’t know what it feels like to be touched by someone who… ”
She stopped.
“By someone who what?” He was barely breathing.
“By someone who makes me feel like the only woman in the world.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “By someone who has ruined me for anyone else, regardless of whether my maidenhead remains intact.”
William closed his eyes against the wave of emotion that crashed over him, guilt and love and desperate longing all tangled together in a knot he could not untangle.
She was right. He had ruined her, not in the technical sense, but in every way that mattered. He had shown her what passion could be, and in doing so, had made the tepid contentment of a respectable marriage impossible for her to accept.
And the worst part, the absolute worst part, was that he was glad.
Because the thought of Eliza in Edmund Alcott’s bed, Eliza giving herself to another man, Eliza spending her life with someone who would never appreciate what they had, that thought made him want to tear the world apart.
“I don’t know what happens when the Season ends,” he said finally. “I have never… I have spent so long believing certain things about myself. About what I’m capable of. And you’ve made me question all of it.”
“What things?”
“That I cannot be trusted with someone’s heart.” He opened his eyes and met her gaze. “That I will inevitably hurt anyone who loves me. That I am doomed to repeat the patterns of my parents, either destroying someone with my suspicion or abandoning them when things become difficult.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know.” The admission cost him more than he could express. “I look at you, and I think… I think perhaps I could be different. Perhaps, with you, I could learn to be the kind of man who stays. Who trusts. Who doesn’t destroy everything he touches.”
Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “William—”
“But I’m afraid.” The words came out raw, unvarnished. “I’m terrified that I’m wrong. That the moment I let myself believe, the moment I reach for something real, I will revert to what I was. And you will pay the price for my failure.”
She was silent for a long moment. Then she reached out and touched his face, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw with devastating tenderness.
“What if we’re both afraid?” she asked softly. “What if we’re both terrified of the same thing, of wanting something we’re not sure we’re allowed to have?”
“What would you have us do?”
“I don’t know.” Her thumb brushed across his cheekbone. “But I know that these past weeks have been the happiest of my life. And I know that when I think about the Season ending, when I think about walking away from you, I feel something that goes far beyond fear.”
“What do you feel?”
“Grief.” The word was barely audible. “I feel like I’m mourning something that hasn’t died yet. Like I’m already grieving a future we never let ourselves imagine.”
William gathered her close, pressing her against his chest, her heart beating against his in the silence of the room.
He should tell her. Should say the words that had been building in his chest for weeks: I love you, I want you, I cannot imagine my life without you.
Should ask her to stay. Not for the Season. Forever.
But the old fears were too strong. The certainty that he would fail, that he would hurt her, that love was a trap that destroyed everyone who fell into it, all of it held his tongue.
“We don’t have to decide today,” he said instead. “We have six weeks. That’s time enough to…”
To what? To figure out how to let you go? To prepare myself for the devastation of watching you marry someone else?
“To see what happens,” he finished weakly.
She nodded against his chest, but he felt the dampness of tears on his skin.
She was crying.
He had made her cry.
And still, he could not say the words that would fix it.
She left as the sun was setting, slipping back into her dress with his help, allowing him to button her up and restore her to respectability. At the door, she turned and looked at him with an expression that made his chest ache.
“Six weeks,” she said.
“Six weeks.”
“And then?”
He had no answer. He had nothing but fear and longing and the desperate hope that somehow, impossibly, he might find the courage to reach for what he wanted before it was too late.
“Then we decide,” he said. “Together.”
She nodded once, then turned and walked to the waiting carriage.
William watched until she disappeared down the drive, her silhouette swallowed by the gathering dusk.
I love you, he thought; the words he could not say aloud.
Please don’t make me let you go.