Chapter Thirty-Nine
Tha?s slipped out of Elinor’s wedding breakfast as soon as she could get away with it. She was happy for her friends. They were so in love.
But the trouble with people in love was that they were hard to watch when you had a broken heart. It was infernal torture to be so close to Alastair, knowing he did not return her feelings. Knowing he thought so much of her body and so little of her soul.
She walked home to her suite of rooms. She still adored it, but she’d be leaving this place soon. She didn’t need such a sumptuous apartment if she was not using it to entertain patrons. She’d be moving to a cozy maisonette near the Institute to start her new life.
She took off her orange gown and hung it in her wardrobe. She’d chosen it at the dressmaker’s because she knew it made her hair look lustrous, and she knew Alastair could not resist her hair. Since it wouldn’t do to wear something that clung to her figure at a wedding breakfast, she’d shown off the next best thing.
It had worked, she reckoned. She’d felt his eyes on her, begging her to look at him.
She’d not obliged. Looking at him, or—Lord forbid it—talking to him, only made her sad.
She was tired of being sad. It was bone-wearying to feel so sorry for yourself.
She put on a dressing gown and climbed into her bed to take a nap, but she could not drift off. Blasted Alastair and his doleful eyes were keeping her awake.
It did not help when someone started pounding on her door.
“Crotch of Satan, stop that racket,” she yelled. “I’m a-bloody-sleep.”
But the pounding continued.
It must be Sera and Cornelia come to comfort her. They’d been especially soft on her since she’d told them of her insipid swollen heart, determined to make her cheerful.
Too bad for them she’d set herself on never being cheerful again.
She fumbled off her eye mask and marched to the parlor. “Who’s there?” she called. “Is it you bloody harpies come to torment me?”
“It’s me,” Eden’s voice answered. “Alastair.”
Her heart, of course, stopped beating.
Not that she’d give him the satisfaction of knowing it.
“What do you want, Eden?” she yelled through the door.
“To speak to you,” he replied. “Please, Tha?s.”
She looked down at herself, barely dressed, and decided to let him in. At least he could feast his eyes on what he’d decided wasn’t good enough for him.
She yanked the door open. He stood there pale and drawn but still so handsome it punched her in the guts.
He did not glance at her bosom, curse him. Instead, he looked into her eyes and swallowed, hard.
“What?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest, like they might protect her from the sight of him. It didn’t work. She couldn’t see him without remembering how it felt when he held her. She wished she was not hemmed in by dignity and could throw herself into his arms.
“May I come in?” he asked.
She moved aside. “Make yourself happy.”
“Tha?s,” he said quietly, “the only thing on this earth that could make me happy is you.”
Nice words from a man who’d made it his habit to reject her on grounds she wasn’t good enough for him.
“You blister-cocked bastard, Eden,” she erupted. “Whose fault do you think it is that you don’t have me?”
He dropped to his knees right on the old wood floorboards, took her hands, and put them to his heart.
“Mine. Entirely mine. And I am the most abjectly brick-brained hypocrite who has ever lived. You have every right to loathe me and would be right to do so for the way I’ve treated you, for which there is no apology grave or fervent enough to possibly suffice. But please know that I am soaked in shame for how I’ve treated you.”
He took her hand and brought it to his lips.
“If you want me to go,” he whispered, “I’ll go. But not before I ask the woman I love to be my wife.”
She gaped at him, her hand limp in his. Love? Wife?
Was he addled? Where had this come from?
She snatched her hand away. “Get up,” she said. “I’m not rabbit-brained enough to swoon for handsome words. I know how you think of me, and it’s not like a husband would. Have you forgotten who you are?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “And I despise myself for my snobbery and blindness. If I could take back the past, I would have married you in Gloucestershire.”
His face was tight with pain, and for all her rancor toward him, she didn’t like to see it. It was impossible not to notice how thin he’d grown. Between that and his pallor, she almost pitied him. Whatever had brought this on, the man was clearly miserable.
Which is what she’d thought she wanted—for him to feel as bad as she did. So why did she want to take him in her arms?
“Tha?s,” he said quietly, “I don’t know how to ask your forgiveness. I know I don’t deserve it. It was my dream to be a perfect husband, and I’ve already failed you. But if you’d have me, I’d do anything to make it right.”
He was sincere. She knew it by the way tears glimmered in his eyes. He’d never been able to hide his emotions from her.
It made her want to cry as well.
“Tell me why this madness has suddenly come over you,” she said. “Were you clobbered in the head?”
“It’s not madness, and it isn’t sudden. I fell in love with you in that cottage in the Cotswolds and have not stopped thinking about you since. That has not changed. But I was so set in the belief that I had to wed within my station that I failed to see I had already met the person perfect for me. And this morning, at the wedding breakfast, I realized I was wrong.”
She’d made a point to pay him no attention at the breakfast. It was too painful. So she was not certain what about it had so altered his heart.
But the sincerity in his words softened her. Made her curious.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “But if you get up off the floor I’ll sit with you, and you can try to solve the puzzle for me.”
He rose, his knees cracking, and sat beside her on a sofa. She put a cushion between them, because her instinct was to be wary of him until she knew what had caused this change of heart.
“Tha?s, my father married a baker’s daughter and eschewed the aristocracy for poetry, and they lived outside the mores of polite society. Their life was chaos. She went mad, and he drifted into opium, and they were loving but so unhappy. Our home was a shambles, and I suffered for it. And in my boy’s mind, I thought that if they had only followed the rules, married the right people, behaved according to the letter, all the pain they endured could have been avoided. So in my life, I have tried to be upstanding and respectable in all the ways they weren’t. Perfection is the antidote to anarchy, I thought. If I behaved exactly as I ought, pain could be avoided.
“And then I met you and felt free and content in a way I never imagined possible. Our month in the country was the happiest of my life. And since we parted, the pain of not having you near me has been the worst thing I have ever endured. And despite that, foolishly I told myself I was simply failing to meet the right woman. But this morning, I finally realized that the trouble was I had already met her and been too dead set on so-called perfection to realize what I should put above all else is love.”
“You love me?” she said, pointing to herself.
He laughed brokenly. “I do. Madly. I ran all the way here to tell you just how much.”
She could not hold back a smile. “So tell me.”
He spoke in dizzying sentences about her cursing, her temper, and her tenderness. Her body, her touch, her smell. The way she made him laugh and the way she brought him to his knees in bed and the way she always seemed to know what he was thinking. The way her hugs made him feel like he was home at last.
It was that final thing that made her close the distance between them.
Because he was right.
She pulled her man into her arms. “You idiot,” she whispered, burrowing her face into his neck.
“I know,” he said. “If I court you with dancing and stolen kisses and walks along the Serpentine, will you give me another chance?”
“Seduction won’t work on me. I taught you all the tricks.”
“What if I simply say I want to be with you. To marry you and make a family with you. To take care of you and make love to you and cook for you. To fall asleep laughing with you and wake up beside you every morning.”
She’d say he had her, were it not for the fear he’d change his mind when the scandal overtook them.
“You know the whole ton would turn on you for marrying me. Even earls can’t get away with wedding whores.”
“They can say whatever they like about us. I don’t care about the opinions of a society I don’t value. I don’t care what people think about us. Unless—do you? Would it hurt you to be the subject of a scandal?”
“Oh, I couldn’t say. Being infamous would be so fresh and new.”
He snorted. “You do seem to have a knack for it.”
“But what about perfection and all that? Because even if I listen to your wild plan, I’m not changing a hair on my head for the likes of you.”
She said it hoarsely. Her voice was choked with tears.
He stood up and knelt before her. “Don’t change your hair. It’s perfect.”
She wrapped her arms around him. “I told you, there’s no such thing as perfect.”
“Very well. Perfect for me. I’m just sorry I didn’t see it sooner. But I hope that—”
“Oh, shut up. I love you too. I should have wrung your bloody neck two months ago and saved us both the agony.”
“Would you like to wring it now?”
“Can’t have you bruised on my wedding day. A lady only gets the one.”
“I was thinking I’d get a special license. I could go this afternoon, and we could marry in a few days’ time.”
“Do it tomorrow. You’ll be busy this afternoon.”
“With what?”
She pointed at the bedchamber.