Chapter Fourteen
They made it less than a mile out of Lewes before the carriage was forced to stop, a jerking, unplanned halt that threw both Seph and Rhys out of their mutual stony silence and into the walls, floors, and doors of the carriage, ultimately colliding with one another.
“Myn brain i!” Rhys choked, stabilizing Seph about the upper arms as she clawed at his coat, her feet skidding against the slick floor of the compartment before she anchored herself. “Mr. Cagney?!”
Seph gave a delicate cough, shoving herself off him and flopping back on her seat as Rhys prized the door open and leaned his head out.
“Girl,” said the driver. “In the road.”
Seph sighed.
“She’s all alone, wee thing,” Mr. Cagney continued. “I’ll go talk to her.”
“No!” said Rhys, giving Seph a meaningful and emphatic glare. “No, we know her. Seph!”
She glowered at him, crossing her arms. “We do?”
“Good show,” came an American woman’s voice from farther afield. “Thank you kindly for not trampling me.”
Seph straightened, frowning, which seemed to satisfy Rhys, judging from the way his hard stare dissolved into relief.
“Coming?” he asked, hopping out and holding his hand out to her. “Come.”
“Fine,” she said, accepting the offer, scrambling down out of the coach more out of curiosity than anything else.
Privately, she was grateful for the interruption. She wasn’t certain she could have endured the entire trip back to Brighton in the silent suspension of ice they had been fostering, even if it had been her own doing.
She’d been searching her mind for something to say to crack that ice since about twenty seconds after she’d stormed away from the breakfast table. Alas, nothing had come.
“Mrs. Winterstone?” Rhys called, trotting ahead of Seph to meet the other woman halfway. “What are you about, spooking our horses?”
“I overslept,” she answered with a shrug of her delicate shoulders, clad today in a jaunty canary yellow overcoat with a large amber brooch over her heart. “And I needed to speak to the two of you.”
Seph tried to speed along without looking as though she were exerting the effort, shuffling along the pebbled path ahead of the coach until she came up to Rhys’s side, opposite Mrs. Winterstone.
The other woman looked up at her, her eyes shaded by a starched bonnet of yellow and black, and grinned widely. “I’m Lavinia Winterstone,” she said. “You can call me ‘Nini.’ And you are Rhys Caradoc and Persephone Boswell, yes?”
“Yes,” Rhys agreed, his tone sounding a bit wary. “We are.”
“You are the only ones who will not accept Merlin’s invitation to stay at his estate,” she informed him. “I am here to talk you into a change of heart.”
“What?” said Seph. “You’ve spoken to the others?”
Nini shook her head, her grin still in place. “I haven’t.”
Rhys glanced at her with a lift of his dark brows, as though to say, I told you so.
“We might not be able to, madam,” Seph said politely. “I’ve a shop to run in Brighton, and my associate Mr. Caradoc is bound by … erm, prior obligations.”
“Find a way,” Nini suggested, her tone breezy and light as though she were simply suggesting they try a particular canape when it passed by. “It is important to him. More important than he’ll say. And this is the only chance we’ll have to do right by him.”
Rhys turned back to her at that, his eyes narrowing. “How did you get out here?” he asked. “How did you know where our carriage would be?”
“How do you think?” she answered, mimicking his squint. “What do you think I did?”
Rhys frowned. “It is rude,” he said, “to go rummaging around in minds that didn’t invite you.”
Nini Winterstone laughed, shaking her head and dropping her hands on her hips. “I took my own coach,” she told him. “It’s waiting around the bend. And this is the only road that goes directly to Brighton, Mr. Caradoc. I’m afraid it was only simple deduction and a fast horse.”
“Right,” said Rhys. “And knowing who will say yes and who will say no?”
“Wouldn’t you love to know?” the lady said, dropping her akimbo pose and turning to walk away, back toward her awaiting transport. “I’ll see you at the estate,” she called over her shoulder as she went. “Come tomorrow if you can, day after at the latest.”
“Mrs. Winterstone!” Seph cried, taking a step after her, but Rhys stopped her, his hand flashing out and wrapping around her bicep.
She turned to look at him curiously and he only shook his head.
“What’s the point?” he said. “She’ll know every argument you’re going to make before you get the words out.”
“Rhys,” Seph groaned, pressing her fingers into the bridge of her nose.
“Never argue with a wealthy widow,” he told her. “Trust me on that one. Come on, we can discuss it further on the road.”
“Fine,” said Seph.
At least now the silence was broken.
*
Rhys had instructed Mr. Cagney to drive them to the Lanes as soon as they returned to Brighton. He reasoned that the first step before any decisions could be made, he’d have to check in with the bloody barrister to make sure he was allowed to consider it in the first place.
It made him feel like a child again. Like he needed to ask permission to go on a lark.
Annoying.
But Harcourt was a sensible sort. It was, as far as Rhys could tell, one of his only traits. So, he felt optimistic about the proposal, despite his offense that he had to make one at all.
“Do I really need to be with you for that?” Seph asked. She was curled up on her side of the carriage so tightly that she looked like a napping cat in winter, tail tucked, ears down, paws hidden.
He tried not to smile at the vision she made.
He knew that would only irk her.
“Yes,” he said. “Why would I drop you off on King’s Road, round back to the Lanes, then return to King’s Road to tell you the outcome? This makes more sense.”
“I suppose it does if you assume your outcome has anything to do with me and my decisions,” she replied with a sniff.
And then he couldn’t help smiling just a little and making those odd duochrome eyes narrow at him.
It was her own fault.
“About Sarah,” he said—because he was an idiot.
She coiled tighter, her shoulders hunching up against her ears. “Rhys …”
“If you had told me your cousins were verboten territory, I would have respected it,” he continued, holding her eye. “One word from you, and I’d never have spoken to that girl again.”
She pressed her lips together, averting her eyes. “That isn’t the point. It wasn’t the point.”
“She doesn’t really look like you, once you’ve spoken to her,” he pressed, his heart twisting in coils around all the wet and sloppy tubing that made up his insides. He shifted, hating the sensation. “I’d have kept you any day of the week.”
“Yes, I know,” she answered, her voice half a whisper, eyes still on the scuffed toes of his boots. “That isn’t … It wasn’t … I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Then why did you bring it up?!” he asked, exasperated. “I am sorry. I did not know I was … I didn’t think you would … Seph!”
At that, she did look at him, her eyes snapping up to meet his. “Rhys!” she replied in a mimic of his own tone. “It’s fine. I don’t care anymore.”
“Well, I do!” he snapped, slapping his hands onto his knees.
“You broke my damned heart that day. You humiliated me. And if that weren’t bad enough, leaving me standing like a fool on that stage for all the world to laugh at, once I found you again, you wouldn’t speak to me at all.
For years. Do you have any idea what that does to a person? To be betrayed like that?”
Her jaw clenched, the delicate muscles beneath her ears twitching. “I have some idea,” she said tightly.
“Oh, just the same, was it?” he replied, incredulously. “I kissed some easy chit because I was young and randy and couldn’t have what I … What … It’s not the same at all, Seph.”
“Fine,” she said, scooting further down into the cushions and turning her back to him, her voice muffled as it bounced off the velvet upholstery. “I was wicked and cruel and evil. That’s fine. It’s been fine. I didn’t ask you to change it.”
He stared at her back, his hands flexing over his kneecaps.
She didn’t move a single muscle. She didn’t flutter or shiver or let her breath quiver with tears. She was stone. Coal and silver stone.
“Fine.” He flung himself back, his head opposite hers, arms crossed over his chest.
“Fine,” she agreed.
And then they both pretended to sleep.