11. In Which a Public Claim Is Made and Private Lines Are Crossed – The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Ashbourne House, L #2
"If I leave," I said quietly, "it won't stop. Dunmore will wait. The family will plan. And when I come back, everything will be exactly the same except I'll have lost three months of my life hiding from a problem I can't avoid."
Edward was quiet for a long moment. Then: "What if you didn't come back alone?"
My breath caught. "What?"
"What if when you came back to London, you came back engaged to someone else?"
The air between us changed. Became charged with something dangerous.
"Who?" I asked, though I already knew.
Edward didn't answer. But he was looking at me like the answer was obvious.
"Edward." My voice was shaking. "What are you saying?"
"I don't know." He ran a hand through his hair, destroying whatever careful arrangement his valet had created.
"I don't know what I'm saying. I just know that watching Dunmore give you flowers tonight made me want to throw him into the Thames.
And watching you accept them—watching you perform that smile and say 'how kind'—was worse. "
"I didn't want them."
"I know. That's what makes it unbearable." Edward took a step closer. "Charlotte, why do I keep saving you?"
"I don't know."
"You asked me that at the conservatory. And at the ball. And I keep giving you the same non-answer because I don't know how to say the real one."
My heart was pounding. "What's the real answer?"
"Because watching you trapped makes me furious.
Because seeing you with Dunmore makes me want things I shouldn't want.
Because every time you send Eleanor with a note saying 'SOS,' I drop everything to come rescue you, and it's not about being protective anymore. It hasn't been about that for weeks."
"What's it about?"
Edward looked at me. Really looked at me, with no performance, no careful distance, no pretense of avuncular concern.
"You know what it's about."
I did. I'd known for weeks, possibly longer. I'd just been too afraid to name it.
"We can't," I whispered.
"I know."
"You're—" I stopped. Uncle. The word I'd used for eleven years. The word that no longer fits. "You're family."
"Step-family. No blood relation." Edward's voice was rough. "I've checked. Extensively. There's no legal impediment. No moral one, even, except that you're seventeen and I'm twenty-three and I've known you since you were six years old."
"And that bothers you?"
"It terrifies me. Every time I look at you and feel—this—I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Like I'm taking advantage. Like I'm exactly the kind of man I've spent my whole life trying not to be."
"You're not taking advantage."
"Aren't I? You're seventeen. You're overwhelmed by your first Season. You're being pressured into a match you don't want. And I'm—" He stopped. "I'm the person rescuing you. Being needed feels like purpose to someone who's never believed he had any. How do I know I'm not just?—"
"Stop." I closed the distance between us.
We were standing very close now. Close enough that I could see the particular green of his eyes in the moonlight.
"Stop deciding for me what I want. Stop trying to protect me from yourself.
I'm not some helpless debutante who doesn't understand her own mind. "
"Then what do you understand?"
Everything. Nothing. The fact that I'd spent five years managing everyone else's love lives and had completely failed to recognise my own.
"I understand that I've been calling you for weeks, and you keep coming.
I understand that you've been attending every event you hate just to run interference on Dunmore.
I understand that every stolen moment we have feels more real than anything else in my entire Season.
" I took a breath. "And I understand that when Dunmore gave me those flowers tonight, all I could think was: wrong.
The wrong person is giving them. Wrong words. Wrong everything."
"Charlotte—"
"What's the right version?" The question came out before I could stop it. "If Dunmore is wrong, what's right?"
Edward's hand came up to my face. Didn't quite touch. Hovered there, a fraction of an inch from my cheek.
"This," he said quietly. "This is right. Being here with you. Talking to you like you're not a child I need to protect but a woman I—" He stopped.
"A woman, you what?"
His thumb brushed across my cheek. Once. Barely contact.
I felt it like lightning.
"A woman I can't stop thinking about," Edward said. "A woman who makes me want things I've spent my whole life believing I didn't deserve. A woman who sends her eleven-year-old sister with notes about snuffbox emergencies, and I come running because I can’t not come."
We were so close now. His hand cupping my face. My hand inside his jacket, somehow on his chest, feeling his heartbeat through his shirt and waistcoat.
One of us just needed to move. To close the last inch of distance.
"Edward," I whispered.
"We should go inside." His voice was rough. "Before someone notices. Before we do something we can't take back."
"What if I want to do something we can't take back?"
His breath caught. "Charlotte?—"
"What if I'm tired of being managed and protected and told what I should want? What if I want to make my own catastrophic decisions?"
"Choosing me would be catastrophic."
"Would it?"
"Yes. Your family would be horrified. Society would gossip. Lucas would possibly call me out. And you—" Edward's voice cracked. "You deserve better than someone who's spent eighteen months running from his own guilt. Someone who believes, deep down, that he killed his mother just by being born."
"You didn't kill her."