Chapter Eighteen #2
Mavis smiled then, a sharp, wild-eyed smile that should have frightened him but sparked an entirely more frustrating reaction instead. “You,” she said slowly, “are underestimating me.”
Arden’s mouth went dry, but he managed to form words all the same. “I could never.”
She glanced away from him, and he thought he saw a flush steal over her cheeks.
Before he could be certain, she pushed away from the door and brushed past him, making her way down the hallway to the sitting room and giving him no choice but to follow.
“Rafe and Leif are trying to confirm Thaddeus’s finances as we speak—it’s possible this is all a misunderstanding and nothing has changed after all. ”
Mavis might have been an excellent liar, but apparently that talent didn’t hold when she was lying to herself, yet Arden couldn’t bring himself to call her out on it.
Instead he watched her cross the room to the sideboard and pour a glass of whiskey.
She paused, then poured a second, which she offered to him.
His misgivings must have shown on his face because Mavis’s mouth twisted into a wry smile as she took a sip.
“I’m sorry. I know this must feel a little too familiar for you. Though I can’t take credit for Thaddeus’s financial ruin.”
“It isn’t the same,” Arden told her before he could stop himself.
When she raised her eyebrows, he ignored her, taking a deep drink of his own whiskey and deciding to change the subject.
He shoved his doubts about his con to the side—Mavis was right earlier; there were more important things at stake than his guilt.
“What should my next step be with Oriana?”
Mavis considered it as she took another sip. “I’ll work on Thaddeus to see if I can gauge her interest through him—that should tell us where you stand now.”
Arden didn’t want to know what working on Thaddeus entailed, but his imagination was all too eager to supply a bevy of possibilities all the same, each one more illicit than the last. He shoved those images from his mind and shook his head.
“Thaddeus seemed to be in a sore mood during the pageant,” he said. “Maybe the stress is getting to him.”
Mavis rolled her eyes. “I doubt it’s that. He’s been in a sore mood ever since the regatta—finances aside, he might be my most insufferable fiancé to date.”
Arden wondered where he fell in that ranking, but he didn’t dare ask. “Not everyone is a gracious loser.”
She laughed. “Oh, I think he’d have been gracious enough if he’d lost to the Hoxhas.
It’s the losing to Lacks that seems to have really gotten to him.
One would hope the pageant would lift his spirits, if anything could.
He might have lost a boat race to those people, but the Gods of Old still declared him superior, so what does it matter? ”
Arden thought about the pageant they’d seen earlier in the day and cringed. “I don’t know why we still trot out that old myth. Times are changing, the regatta is only the most recent example of that.”
Mavis glanced at him, brow furrowing. “Well, I imagine it’s precisely because times are changing that the myth is more important to the Lusters than ever. Oh, don’t worry—the Lacks may rise beyond their station, but they will never be blessed by the Gods of Old. It’s meant to comfort you.”
Arden’s skin felt tight, but he managed a shrug. “I don’t feel comforted by it.” He didn’t know why he felt compelled to say it, why he wanted to make sure she knew he wasn’t like Thaddeus, like the rest of the Lusters.
Her smile was sharp. “No?” she asked, her voice sprinkled with mockery. “You aren’t afraid of a scourge of Lack dirt coming to tarnish your Luster?”
There was that phrase again—Lack dirt—she’d used it at Montenari’s, but there was something familiar there that he couldn’t put his finger on. She must have seen the confusion on his face because the hard-edged smile faltered and she looked at him with true surprise.
“You don’t remember?” she asked before shaking her head. “Of course you don’t—why would you? We were in the park, the day before you asked me to marry you. Do you remember that?”
Arden did. He had taken her out in his open-topped carriage, the one he could drive himself.
He remembered how they had made a show of saying hello to other Luster families who were out and about, the picture of politeness, all the while her hand had been an absolute torment on his thigh, causing him to nearly lose control of his horses more times than he could count.
He remembered finding a private area where they were sheltered by trees and how he’d chased her through the woods, following the sound of her laughter and the trail of clothes—first her slippers, then her hat, then her dress.
When he finally found her, she was leaning against a tree in only her chemise, waiting for him.
Arden remembered that more clearly than he was keen to admit to her now, the way her legs wrapped around his waist and the heat of her kiss.
The rush he had been in to free himself from his trousers, the way she felt around him and the way she had cried out his name as she came apart in his arms. But that wasn’t what she was talking about now.
When they’d followed the trail of her clothes back to his carriage, trying in vain to make themselves presentable, Arden had been shocked out of his satisfied stupor to find a band of thieves attempting to steal his horse.
His shout scared them off—a group of adolescents not much younger than they were, and when he looked at Mavis, she’d had a peculiar look on her face.
Nothing to worry about, Arabella, he’d assured her, pulling her toward him and kissing her brow. Just a scourge of Low City dirt.
Low City dirt. The words had been his, said so casually that he’d forgotten them, but Mavis hadn’t. Because in her mind, he’d been speaking about her. He had been speaking about her—he just hadn’t known it at the time.
“I was upset that those thieves were stealing my horse,” he told her now, defensiveness creeping into his voice.
Mavis’s expression, just moments ago easy to read, shuttered once again. “You reminded me who I was. I ought to thank you, really.”
“Why?”
Mavis glanced away, looking as if she were considering her next words carefully. “Because sometimes, in my line of work, it’s easy to get lost in my own lies, to lose sight of what is real and what is just an illusion. But in that moment, I saw how you saw me—the real me.”
Arden felt sick to his stomach. “Mavis—”
“I’m not saying it to be cruel,” she interrupted, her voice sharpening as her eyes snapped back to his. “I’m saying it because you were right. I am Low City dirt, but that was the first time I felt ashamed of that fact. I swore it would also be the last.”
Arden searched his memory for how things had changed between them after that day.
He’d asked her to marry him, and he thought they were happy, but she’d grown distant and he never understood why.
Perhaps, if he hadn’t said those things, she might have felt safe enough—loved enough—to tell him the truth, to ask him for help.
Or maybe not. Maybe nothing would have changed at all and they would still be here, exactly where they were, with all their wounds between them. Wounds that hadn’t just been his, he realized now.
He had hurt her five years ago, and that knowledge stunned him. Because if she had begun to believe her own lies like she claimed, then that meant some of them hadn’t been lies at all.
Oh, Arden wasn’t a fool. Most of the lies were just that—the name she called herself, the history she’d crafted out of thin air, the pretenses for most of their early run-ins—but when Arden reached up to brush a strand of copper hair out of her face, he heard her sharp intake of breath, saw the way her full lips parted, and he realized that this, the palpable energy between them that made it so impossible to keep their hands off one another that had plagued his dreams and his nightmares these past five years, this hadn’t been a lie.
Not until he’d made it one himself with his careless, bigoted words.
Mavis hated Arden a little bit for the way he was looking at her.
He had wanted to understand her, to see her clearly, but Mavis had forgotten just how it felt to be seen by Arden, to be looked at with that burning intensity in his twilight-blue eyes, like there was no world outside the two of them. She had missed it too, though.