Chapter Twenty-Four
Mavis jumped at the knock on the door, her heart thudding. In the few hours since Thaddeus made his threats, she kept expecting the police to barge through the door at any moment to arrest her. But if the police had come for her, she couldn’t imagine they would knock.
She was alone in the hotel room. Rafe and Leif were who knew where—something Mavis was grateful for since it gave her more time to figure out how to convince them to leave town without her.
Mavis might have been an excellent liar, but she never could manage to lie to them, and if they knew the truth about just how thoroughly she’d damned herself, they would stay by her side all the way to prison.
She refused to let them suffer for her own foolish mistakes.
The knock sounded again.
Warily, she made her way down the hall to the entryway and peered through the peephole, but when she saw no one on the other side, she pulled back, pausing with her hand on the door handle.
It had only been two days since her encounter with Arden on the beach.
How was it that everything could change so thoroughly that it felt like an entirely different lifetime?
It had been monumentally foolish, she knew that now, but even though the consequences hung over her head like a dagger, she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it.
Oh, the thought of Thaddeus witnessing even a second of what passed between her and Arden made her skin crawl, but she refused to let him taint it.
If the memory of that night was all Mavis had to keep her warm when she was rotting in a Garlin prison, then she would treasure it.
Inviting Arden in now was courting danger, and she had more than her share of that as it was, but still, she opened the door.
She felt Arden brush past her before shaking free of his invisibility as soon as she closed the door behind him, appearing before her in linen trousers and a white cotton shirt, a matching linen jacket slung over one shoulder.
He looked so handsome it made her chest ache, but she forced herself to keep her distance, to keep her hands at her sides, no matter how badly she wanted to reach out to him—even just to smooth his wind-tousled hair.
Touching Arden, even in the most innocent of ways, could only lead to disaster.
She’d felt it herself, how quickly he caused her to take leave of her senses and reduced her to a pile of want.
But the wanting didn’t change the fact that they had no future.
She’d forgotten that five years before, when she had been young and drunk on the sort of love and hope that she’d been denied as a child.
Was it any surprise she had gorged herself on both at the first opportunity, until she was the sort of starry-eyed fool she’d always scoffed at before?
Mavis thought she was too smart to fall into that trap again.
She told herself she’d built up an immunity to hope, that she’d encased her heart in armor so thick no one could reach it.
She told herself that was for the best. And it had taken just an hour alone on a beach to undo all that hard work.
To make her begin to forget all over again exactly who she was, and who he was.
And now she was going to pay the price for it, but that didn’t mean Arden had to suffer too.
Arden’s gaze traveled over her like a caress, sweeping over her simple faded blue cotton dress that she’d had for years.
Even with a wardrobe of fine silks and handcrafted lace, the dress was her favorite—the one she always reached for when she knew she would be spending the day away from Luster society.
It was the dress she chose simply for herself, not anyone else.
Despite that, Mavis was aware of the heat in Arden’s eyes as they raked over every inch of her, and she felt as if on some level, she’d chosen the dress for him, to entice him to look at her the way he was now.
Disaster, a voice whispered through Mavis’s mind, but it carried far less weight than it had only a moment ago. I’m already damned, what more could I lose?
When Arden’s eyes reached hers again, his brow furrowed.
“What’s wrong?” He stepped toward her, though he stopped short a few inches away, and Mavis didn’t know whether or not to be grateful for the small distance between them.
She shook her head. “Nothing.” Even to her own ears, the word rang hollow.
Arden’s frown deepened. “Now who’s a terrible liar?”
Part of her resented that, but it was the truth—she didn’t have it in her to be a good liar today. How could she, when she felt like a fraying rope held together by a single thread?
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him. He opened his mouth to argue, and she knew if he pushed her any further, she just might shatter like a dropped champagne flute. “Please, Arden.”
There must have been something in her voice because after hesitating a beat, he nodded. “I . . . I have good news—that’s why I came here. Oriana is considering my proposal, and I believe she’ll accept it.”
“Oh.” Mavis wasn’t quite able to hide her surprise. She shouldn’t have been surprised. He and Oriana had been growing closer, and this was, after all, precisely what she’d been aiming for the last three weeks. And yet, she still felt the news like a slap. “That’s wonderful, Arden.”
And it was—Oriana agreeing to his proposal meant Arden would have his fortune back, and more than that, it meant Rafe and Leif would be able to buy their freedom. This was what Arden had been working toward for weeks, and she wouldn’t let her own fear tarnish his happiness.
Although he didn’t look particularly happy.
“We should celebrate.” Injecting false brightness into her voice, she turned toward the credenza, opening the cabinet that contained several bottles of liquor. “We don’t have champagne, but we do have whiskey.”
“Whiskey will do,” Arden said, suddenly closer than she expected.
Close enough that the words ghosted over the nape of her neck.
She closed her eyes, trying to gather her senses, but she felt as if she could sooner gather the stars themselves.
“There isn’t anything to celebrate, though—she hasn’t accepted my suit yet,” he added.
Mavis remembered what he said on the beach. The instant Oriana accepts my suit, I swear to every God of Old, I will never touch another woman. I owe her that at the very least. But until then, I’m unattached.
Understanding dawned. Perhaps she should be offended by his presumption, but instead she was only relieved that he was here, that she didn’t have to be alone. She couldn’t rightly say he was hers, but in this moment, he was no one else’s. That had to be enough.
She left the whiskey unopened and turned around to find herself chest to chest with Arden, his blue eyes dark and his face unreadable, even for her.
Disaster, she thought again, the word all but lost amid the desire roaring through her. Still, she scrabbled together one last effort to heed the warning. “But she will. And then you’ll marry her like your aunt wants, and . . .” She swallowed. “. . . and you’ll live the life you were born for.”
The life he never would have lost if she hadn’t crashed into it twice over.
The life Arden was born for.
He’d come to Garlin for just that—the life of leisure and luxury that had been promised to him when he was still inside his mother’s womb.
He thought about his family manor in Strall, with its pristine white stone walls and marble floors.
The endless halls even he sometimes got lost in and the bright rooms with their vaulted ceilings, walls lined with portraits of all the Ryskamps who came before him—some he knew, like his mother, his father, his grandfather.
Others he knew only by reputation, like his many times great-grandmother Elistrada Ryskamp, who had used her invisibility to sneak into the enemy camp during the Battle of the Ultria, listening in as a general dictated his strategy, then reporting it back to her general husband, who had used the information to ultimately claim victory.
Her husband’s name had been lost to history, as well as whatever gift he’d possessed.
From Elistrada on, Ryskamp children had only ever inherited Elistrada’s invisibility.
The life Arden was born for was one that would have seen his own painting hung on those walls, his name spoken of for generations to come. They would say how he restored his family’s legacy, how he brought them back to glory. History would remember his triumphs and forget his mistakes.
And those mistakes would include the woman standing in front of him, looking up with bright emerald eyes and full, rose-hued lips that invited him to make a few more.
The life Arden was born for was one of lavish balls and ever-flowing champagne.
It was a life of notoriety and glamour. It was a life of beauty, one without troubles, one most people would kill for.
It was a life that held no place for a common-born con artist with a sharp mind and sharper tongue.
It was a life he had been desperately trying to claw back into for the better part of a year.
It was a life that suddenly sounded fucking miserable.
“Mavis.” Arden’s voice came out so low he wasn’t entirely sure he’d said the word out loud, but she must have heard him because she inhaled sharply, her eyes snapping closed like she was either trying to banish him from her mind or commit him to memory.
Memory, because that was all they would be to one another.
In the life Arden was born for, she would become a hazy figure lurking in the background, a story he would tell at parties when it no longer stung quite so badly—did I ever tell you about the time I fell in love with a con artist?
Twice? Arden suspected it would always sting, though.