The words were familiar, and he recognized them as his own when she had been eager to make herself useful in Drummuir. The ghastly web. She was caught in it, too. And he was holding the strands that bound her. He swallowed. He was falling now, grasping for straws as they flew past, and none of them held.
“You felt like an outcast in your clan, but you’re your father’s daughter,” he finally murmured. “You appear so unassuming, but you’ll strike when it is least expected.” And he didn’t know whether to feel bloody proud about this or to damn it to hell.
She came to him then, and her cool hand pushed into his. He looked down at the familiar shape covering his hot palm, at the intriguing aesthetic of her tapered pale finger. Her hand, unique in the world. An ache tore through in his chest. Only minutes ago, it had felt just like his hand, accessible like his own body, for this was what lovers became for each other when they loved. Now all was changed. Because she was right. He ran his thumb over the silken skin of her wrist. “I hate this,” he whispered, because he couldn’t say I’m hurting. Ironic, that the right thing inevitably crushed his heart when he had only just unearthed it.
“Lucian.” He reluctantly raised his gaze back to her face. Her brown eyes were warm with compassion, a bloody unchangeable sentiment. “Even had you and I begun properly, it would still serve me well to go,” she said. “You see, I was very angry at you after I read the news about Rutland.”
“I recall,” he said. “I thought we had made good.”
She nodded. “We have. But one reason why I was so angry was that I felt stupid. And fooled. I lashed out. If not then, I would have lashed out some other time, because you were right: part of me was testing you. I wanted you to change, to sacrifice, because I had paid such a price. And I wanted proof of your love, because our vows meant nothing, and because I had stupidly traipsed into a trap—”
“Stop saying that word,” he said, his impatience flaring back to life. “You’re not stupid; you’re anything but.”
Her smile was achingly sad. “But I have heard that word, in various guises, for half my life,” she said. “I know it isn’t true, but I don’t feel it. I worry for myself. I have realized that outwardly, I’m well accomplished, but inside, I harbor a version of me still at boarding school, full of old insecurity, and I recognize it now as a breeding ground for odd behavior, for me saying and doing things I don’t mean, for turning to other people’s opinions before consulting my own too often, for feeling unnecessarily hurt because I mix an actual issue at hand with old, still bleeding grievances. I know a few women with such a split disposition—they successfully run a home, but they can’t even make a simple decision without their husbands. Or they insist on controlling meaningless details just to feel in control of something. And what chance did they ever have to be different? We pass seamlessly from father to husband with no opportunity to know ourselves without interference. We are kept childlike in our dependence, in our small world, and in our continued focus on others, and those others keep telling us what we are. But I’m still young. It’s not too late, I can still learn. I already care much less for the opinions of people, and I want more. I need to go to France.”
He signed the papers that brought his authority over her to an end in an ecclesial courtroom in Westminster. Harriet wore a somber gray dress, but her hair glowed like rubies in the drabness of the chamber, and it took effort not to stare at her. Whenever he did look, three distrustful stares skewered him in return, for his wife had gathered her friends around her for support: the Duchess of Montgomery, Lady Catriona, and Ballentine’s dainty missus, Lady Lucinda. That daintiness was a trap; the pointy-faced madam looked ready to tear his throat out with her teeth whenever she caught his eye, and she’d do it gleefully, too.
Outside the courthouse, a blast of cold wind froze his face. Raindrops drizzled into his collar and the cool, wet touch sent shivers down his spine. He glanced at Harriet, who somehow had drifted alongside him through the wide wing doors in the protective circle of her coven. Now she paused and raised her chin at the plaza before them as if to steel herself. Through his frozen dread, he felt a stab of guilt. Their union had begun and ended with headlines in the scandal sheets, when all she had dreamed of had been a rose-tinted production straight from a romantic novel.
He cleared his throat. “You’ll leave soon?”
She turned toward him, and his breath caught. With the soft white fur framing her face, she looked like an ice princess. “Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow.”