Sophie almost—but not quite—felt bad for West. It was Sunday, as fine an early June afternoon as one might have ordered from a catalogue of English delights. She and West had just arrived at the riverfront, having glided over the cobblestoned streets lined with dirty warehouses in the peaceful, quiet splendor of a well-sprung carriage with West’s gleaming crest on the door. No sooner had they made their careful way onto the yacht that would transport them to Richmond, however, than her family descended. “West!” Betsy cried joyfully as soon as she spotted him. “When Sophie told us your news—” “Have you decided on a date?” Harriet interjected eagerly. “She was muttering some nonsense about a long engagement, when obviously—” “Have you finished terrifying the poor man yet?” her father asked jovially, making his way into the fray. “It will be good to have a son at last—” “You have three sons-in-law already,” Maria said through gritted teeth, and for once Sophie felt entirely in sympathy with her sister, considering that all three gentlemen were present on this very boat. “Ah, but young Weston was meant to be the first!” her father said, and Sophie shut her eyes, mortified. She did love her family, but she was beginning to wonder if she would love them more if she lived in Italy, perhaps. “I did always think you and Sophie would have the most beautiful babies!” her mother added, near tears, causing Sophie to reconsider her previous thought. Italy would still be too close. Perhaps the North Pole would suffice. “It is a pleasure to see you again so soon, Lady Wexham,” West said calmly, as polite as ever in the face of her family’s frankly unhinged behavior, and Sophie’s embarrassment faded on a wave of unexpected fondness. There was something so dreadfully comforting about West, she thought—a man who could be trusted to steer a steady course no matter what storm of wildly inappropriate comments he had to weather. She did not want to find him comforting—not when there wasn’t any future for them—and she futilely attempted to will away the feeling. “You must call me Mama!” her mother said, all aflutter, and Sophie contemplated flinging herself into the Thames. “That is very kind of you,” West r eplied, nothing in his tone indicating what Sophie knew to be perfectly true: that he would address her mother so informally only were he to sustain some sort of head injury. Perhaps not even then, come to think of it—she could just imagine him, concussed and suffering from a bout of
amnesia, laid up in bed, still strictly and rigorously polite in his forms of address to every person who visited him in his sickbed. She didn’t like to think of him in a sickbed, she realized; it reminded her of when he had been confined to bed once before—when she had been young and in love and terribly sad and afraid, and she’d not been allowed to see him. It had felt as though her heart were splitting open, then. And even now, the memory dragged up complicated feelings, ones she’d just as happily ignore. By the time they had made their leisurely way several miles west down the Thames and alighted at the Wexhams’ riverfront manor in Richmond, West had been made to dandle one of Maria’s twin babies on his knee, consulted about potential names for Betsy’s baby, quizzed quite rigorously by Alexandra on the subject of Lord Byron (whom West evidently knew personally, and by whom he was not remotely impressed), and even received a grudging nod of approval from Maria when he happily joined her in a discussion of abolition, of which they were both supporters. Sophie tried very hard not to notice any of this, uncomfortably aware that they were essentially lying to her family. She’d thought this would be easier, for some reason. Perhaps, she thought, watching West solemnly offer his index finger for Harriet’s baby, Cecily, to shake, her discomfort stemmed from the fact that this all skirted dangerously close to the future she had envisioned for herself, once upon a time. A future that she had done her best to put out of her mind for the past seven years. It was a beautiful spring day, and they arrived in Richmond to find that a number of blankets had been spread on the lawns stretching down to the river, along with picnic baskets overflowing with sandwiches, savory pies, heaping platters of strawberries, cakes, and bottles of wine; they disembarked from the boat and made their way up the st eps that ascended the sloping lawn toward the feast on offer. It felt natural, somehow, for Sophie to fall into st ep next to West, who, without making it obvious he was doing so, had carefully allowed the rest of the party to precede him. “I’m sorry not to offer you my arm—but if I topple over, I fear I’d take you with me.” His voice was wry, self-d eprecating, amused—but underneath there was a note of bitterness that Sophie disliked. She thought, momentarily, of making a joke in turn, of assuring him that she was clumsy enough to be the likelier candidate to send them tumbling. But no sooner had the thought crossed her mind than she sensed that this would not be the correct thing to say at all; instead she r eplied, “You needn’t apologize for such things, you know.” His gaze was fixed carefully on the st eps as they slowly ascended, and a quick glance sideways showed that his jaw was tight. “I am not bothered by my leg, most of the time. On days when it is particularly damp and it is aching something fierce, or when I have gone on too long a ride or danced one too many waltzes or fenced for too long with Hawthorne, it pains me, but most days, it is a regular sort of ache, a pain I have grown accustomed to. I barely even notice my cane these days—the weight of it in my hand feels natural to me. And I am not such a fool, nor so proud, that I am resentful of the thing that helps me walk nearly as quickly as I once did before my accident.” He paused, but Sophie said nothing in response, sensing that he was just now working himself up to whatever it was he really wanted to say.
“But when I am with you, I find myself bothered by all the ways that I have changed. I’m bothered that I am not the man you once knew. I’m bothered that the pain in my leg reminds me of our past—of all that went wrong between us. And I’m bothered that I am bothered, because I have always prided myself on my ability not to let much of anything bother me at all.” She did turn to look at him now, coming to a quick halt. He stopped as well, but continued to face forward, a muscle ticking in his jaw. He might claim not to let much bother him, but she did not think this was entirely true; rather, he’d been trained since birth to suppress the things that did bother him, to the point that he could pretend they did not exist at all. He’d had this habit when she had first known him, all those years ago, and from what she could tell, it had only worsened with time. She did not tell him this, however—did not know how to do so. Instead, she told him something else that was also entirely true. “You are every bit the man I once knew,” she said softly; his face did not move as she spoke, but she saw him swallow. “I don’t—” She paused, exhaled in frustration. She had, all at once, both too much and too little to say to him, and the words would not come. “I do not know all that you feel—what you must have felt, in the wake of your accident. But it seems to me far stranger that you would not resent the pain in your leg, and all that it reminds you of.” Willingham’s death. Her marriage. She realized, with a guilty start, that she had spent these past years avoiding the thought of what the pain of those initial weeks and months must have been like for him. She had been mired in misery, too, but hers was of a different nature than his—and at least she fully understood the circumstances that had led to it. At least she had not lost her best friend, in addition to the person she’d hoped to marry. To dwell too long on what those early months must have been like for him would have been to allow guilt to consume her—even as she knew, stubbornly, that she had done the right thing. That she had protected not just Maria’s happiness, but ultimately West’s own. Even if it had not felt like it at the time. Nor now, whispered a traitorous little voice in Sophie’s mind. When he spoke at last, his voice was quiet, a bit more hoarse than normal. “I do not like to think of the days I lay in that bed, thinking of David—thinking of...” Thinking of you. The words hovered between them, unspoken but understood. “They were the darkest days of my life, and sometimes, when I look at you— when I walk alongside you, as if nothing has changed—” He broke off, inhaling sharply. “I think of the two people I cared for more than anyone else, before that accident, and the fact that I lost them both, in no small part due to my own foolishness, and I can barely stand to look at myself in the mirror.” There was raw pain etched into every word he spoke, so much that Sophie felt the echo of it de ep within her, and had to swallow against a sudden lump in her throat. Her eyes prickled, but she would not cry—not before him. She’d long since stopped allowing herself to cry over this man. That he should lay the blame at his own feet was suddenly intolerable to her. She blamed the
duke—she blamed the emotions, the impetuousness of youth— but she did not blame West. And suddenly, it felt very important that he should know this. “I know that our past... is what it is,” she said, very carefully, “but I think you should know that you are not to blame for what occurred between us—you are not responsible for your father’s actions.” She hesitated, then added, before she could think better of it, “And I do not think David, were he alive today, would wish you to blame yourself for your accident.” She paused, then finished softly, “There’s plenty of blame to go around.” He reached out a slow hand—slow enough to give her plenty of time to pull away, should she wish—and tilted her chin up slightly, so that their gazes met. “If that is true, then I would say the same to you. I blame my father for threatening you—but you were very young. I do not blame you for being intimidated by a duke, and for marrying someone else instead. Someone whose family would not try to frighten you away.” His tone was bitter, but he held her gaze, the silence taut between them. For a moment, Sophie considered correcting him—telling him the full story, what precisely his father had threatened. If he believed that she merely hadn’t thought him worth facing his father’s hostility... well, she found this close to unbearable. She drew a de ep breath— “Sophie! Why are you dawdling?” called Betsy from the top of the st eps, and Sophie and West blinked, the heavy silence broken. He took a st ep, as if to continue up the stairs, but she reached out and laid a hand on his arm to stop him. And then—quickly, without considering the words, or their wisdom—she said, “I think you should know that—no matter what impression I may have given to the contrary—I have never changed the opinion that I formed of you the first night we met.” “And what was that?” he asked, the words shocking in their roughness, coming from West, who always spoke with such urbane polish. “That you were the best man I’d ever met,” she said. And without another word, she turned to continue up the sloping lawn to where her family waited. West had never known it was possible for a picnic, of all things, to be such a joy and such a torment, all at once. Sophie’s family was largely as he’d remembered them, though her sisters—especially the twins—had all grown terribly mature in the years since he’d last been a regular caller at the Wexham family home. Sort of. “West, duck!” Harriet shrieked, and he obeyed, a projectile flying past overhead. “Is that... a loaf of bread?” he asked as Betsy caught it and cackled gleefully. “It is,” Sophie confirmed from her seat beside him; they were sharing the same blanket, along with Alexandra and Blackford, who had spent much of the past couple of hours mooning at each other so blatantly that West was tempted to ask them if they’d mind finding a blanket of their own for some privacy. “It’s Pass the Bread!” Alexandra said brightly, sipping a glass of wine in a leisurely fashion. “I beg your pardon?” Sophie sighed, but a quick glance in her direction revealed the telltale dimple in her cheek that appeared when she was trying not to smile. “It’s a game they invented when they were children, whenever we’d picnic outdoors; they had a food fight at the dining room table once, when they were about eight—we always dined as a family, even when we were young—and my mother made the mistake of telling them that one did not hurl loaves of bread at one’s sister when one was indoors.”
West immediately saw the logical outcome of Lady Wexham’s unfortunately worded dictate. “Meaning that hurling bread out of doors was perfectly acc eptable?” “That is certainly how they interpreted it,” Sophie said. “And Mama has always said that she wanted to raise daughters who were intelligent and capable of making logical arguments. We thought they might outgrow it, but apparently...” “Watch it!” Alexandra shrieked, flinging herself to the blanket; Blackford was not fast enough, however, and crumbs flew as he was whacked in the head by a flying loaf. The impact gave a surprisingly dense thunk. “Good God,” he muttered, rubbing at his head; without missing a beat, he seized the projectile in question and chucked it as hard as he could in the direction of Harriet, who caught it handily. “Oh, I do like him, Alex!” she called merrily, brandishing the bread in the air. “Well, that is rather fortunate, then,” her sister r eplied, “as I’ve actually a bit of news I wish to share.” Harriet dropped her loaf of bread; a quick glance to one of the other blankets revealed that Lady Wexham was literally aquiver with anticipation. “Robert and I”—Alexandra paused dramatically; Lady Wexham seemed in real danger of toppling forward onto her face—“are going to have a baby!” she finished, flinging a theatrical hand to her stomach. “What?” Lady Wexham shrieked; next to her, Maria clapped her hands to her mouth in horror, then reached over and covered the ears of her infant daughter, which seemed a bit unnecessary to West, given young Charlotte’s age and general ability (or lack thereof) to comprehend spoken English in any of its complexities. “Now, Blackford,” Lord Wexham began, “I only want for my daughter to be happy, but I can’t help thinking this isn’t the way to do things at all—a bit out of order, I must say.” “Lord Wexham,” Blackford began; he had flushed a bright scarlet, and looked as though he wished the grass would open up beneath him and swallow him whole. “I can assure you—” “Now, Papa,” Alexandra said, cutting off Blackford before he could say anything further, “there’s no need to come over all missish, you know. It’s not as though I’m an innocent debutante—I’m a widow! One can hardly expect me to resist temptation when it presents itself in so appealing a guise.” She cast a rapturous look at Blackford, who had been reduced to mere sputtering. “Surely you’re going to marry him though, Alex,” Betsy said in a hushed voice, looking mildly appalled; next to her, Covington, her husband, seemed to be trying very hard not to laugh. A quick glance sideways at Sophie confirmed a similar impulse on her part; she was gazing at Alexandra, West realized, and appeared to be having some sort of silent conversation with her sister. That was when West caught on. “Marriage,” Alexandra said slowly, tapping her chin. “An interesting idea, Betsy, and one that I had not yet considered—thank you so much for suggesting it!” By this point, Blackford seemed to have lost the power of speech entirely, Maria was gaping like a horrified fish as Grovecourt patted her consolingly on the shoulder, and Lady Wexham appeared to be shedding actual tears into her handkerchief.
“Alex,” Sophie said, finally seeming to decide that enough was enough—a judgment with which West rather agreed—“do you think you could stop tormenting Mama and that poor fiancé of yours?” Alexandra flashed her elder sister a brilliant smile. “Since you asked so nicely, Soph, I suppose I could be convinced.” Lord Wexham looked at his middle daughter hopefully. “Does that mean—?” Alexandra sighed dramatically. “Yes, Papa, I was having you on, of course our news is that we’re engaged—Mama, for heaven’s sake, stop crying, or I shall refuse to marry Robert out of pure spite.” “Assuming he still wishes to marry you, after what you have put him through for the last two minutes,” West said, and Alexandra grinned at him. Blackford, for his part, at least seemed to be breathing normally again. “Lord and Lady Wexham,” he said, practically stumbling over his words in his eagerness to get them out, “I assure you that Alexandra was merely joking, and that everything about our betrothal has been entirely proper—” “Now, now, darling Blackford,” said Lady Wexham, who by this point had dried her tears with her handkerchief and was giving her future son-in-law a watery smile, “so long as there is a betrothal to speak of, I find myself much less concerned with what you two may get up to in the back of a carriage.” “Mama!” howled three of her daughters in unison. “Welcome to the family, Blackford,” said Lancashire, Harriet’s husband, with the weary air of a man who has been in volved in a long military campaign, welcoming a fresh-faced new recruit. “And Godspeed to you.” “Speaking of welcoming new members to the family...” Alexandra said, and she cast West a Significant Look. He immediately went still, not liking this Significant Look one bit. Violet was also exceedingly fond of Significant Looks, and he’d learned that they almost never boded well. “Yes?” he ventured cautiously. “Well,” she said, drawing out the word, “I just thought that if West and Sophie are to be married, and Robert and I are to be married—” “A double wedding!” Harriet shrieked. “Precisely!” Alexandra said brightly. Next to West, Sophie let out the faintest groan, likely audible only to him. “Alex!” Lady Wexham’s handkerchief was now waving in the air like some sort of flag, so enthusiastically was she flapping her hands. “I can almost forgive you your wretched trick, my love, because this is a positively brilliant idea!” “I thought so, Mama,” Alexandra said, a trace smugly. Her gaze sharpened on Sophie. “What do you think, Sophie?” She clasped a hand to her breast. “Two sisters, struck by tragedy in their first marriages, both finding love once more, st epping forward into their futures side by side, in the very same church!” West was surprised a
band of trumpet players did not materialize to accompany the moving picture she painted. “Er,” Sophie said, casting him a look of vague horror. Seeing that she was floundering, West st epped into the breach. “What an intriguing idea,” he said, as diplomatically as he could manage. “Does that mean you agree?” Alexandra looked at him eagerly. Considering that Alexandra’s eventual marriage was the goal of this ruse they’d concocted, he didn’t want to risk ruining the entire damned thing, even though a double wedding was decidedly not what he’d agreed to, in his initial conversation with Sophie. He was beginning to think they should have discussed this a bit more. “I don’t know—” “But, West!” Alexandra said, wringing her hands. “What could be more joyous than two sisters celebrating a second chance at love, together?” She batted her eyelashes. West cast Sophie a helpless look. “We’ll consider it, Alex,” Sophie said, rescuing him. “But in the meantime,” she added hastily, raising her wineglass, “perhaps a toast?” West clutched his own wineglass the way a drowning man might grab a life raft, and joined the rest of the group in a hearty round of congratulations. Internally, however, he continued to wonder: What, precisely, had he and Sophie got themselves into? As the afternoon progressed, he had increasing cause to ponder this question; the conversation, mercifully, turned to other topics, and for a while he was spared from doing much more than nodding encouragingly and having a lengthy discussion with one of Sophie’s brothers-in-law about cricket. (He saw Sophie making a determined effort not to laugh at one point, no doubt recalling the moment she had nearly maimed him during their most recent attempt at a cricket match in Cornwall, and he cast a dark look in her direction, which she pointedly ignored.) He might have known this respite would not last; eventually, the group broke up, with Sophie, a couple of her sisters, and all the gentlemen exc ept West and Lord Wexham engaging in a spirited game of pall-mall. West would ordinarily have joined in, but the sloping lawns at Riverton Hall were dec eptively uneven, as he’d noted on the walk up the st eps from the dock, and he thought it might be wise to spare his leg. Sophie had cast him a brief, concerned look, but he waved her on and she was mollified enough to scamper after the twins to help them set the course. It was her natural tendency to fret, he knew; as the eldest of five sisters, she’d spent much of her life doing just that. It was part of the reason he was not married to her, in fact—and to have her fretting over him made some sort of dark, complicated feeling rise up in his chest, one that he did not fully understand and did not care to examine too closely.
Lord and Lady Wexham, meanwhile, were regarding their daughters and their husbands with expressions of mingled fondness and mild concern. (The latter was, in West’s opinion, somewhat justified, considering that at the moment Harriet was setting up a pall-mall stake in a location that offered a decent chance of a player tumbling into the river.) Maria, however, settled herself next to him with an inquisitive look on her face that warned him that whatever was about to come out of her mouth might not be a question he wished to answer. “Are you actually going to marry my sister this time?” she asked, without the merest hint of a pleasantry to soften the blow of the question. This should not have been surprising, based on everything Sophie had ever told him about her closest-in-age sister, and he paused before responding, studying her thoughtfully. She and Sophie bore the strongest resemblance of any of the Wexham daughters; both had similar shades of blond hair and nearly identical brown eyes, though Sophie’s face was softer and Maria’s a bit more angular, giving her the appearance of being the elder sister, despite being two years Sophie’s junior. “As this is the first time we’ve been betrothed,” he said mildly, “I don’t think ‘this time’ is an entirely fair choice of words.” Her gaze on him was sharp. “You might not have been officially betrothed, years ago, but everyone expected you to wed. And then you... didn’t.” “Indeed.” His voice was ever-so-slightly more curt than he generally permitted himself to sound; as far as he was aware, Maria had no idea that his father had threatened her r eputation, should he and Sophie wed, so it was not fair to take out his irritation on her. But she had certainly known at the time that her actions that spring had been risky and foolish, for all that she’d only been eighteen. “I will certainly endeavor in the future not to inconvenience anyone with a life-threatening injury and resulting infection, lest your sister take it into her head to run off and marry someone else in the interim.” He regretted the words almost immediately; he did not need the speculative gleam in Maria’s eyes to tell him that he’d said too much. “Do you mean to tell me that it was Sophie’s idea to marry Bridewell, then?” There was a note of barely concealed eagerness to Maria’s voice that West imagined a Bow Street Runner might experience upon stumbling across a particularly good lead in the hunt for a criminal; he remained uncertain as to whether he or Sophie was the criminal in this metaphor. This was why he disapproved of metaphors. He opened his mouth, then hesitated. What had Sophie told her sisters? He didn’t wish to betray any revelations she wouldn’t be comfortable with, but... But, had the entire Wexham family considered him to be a villain for the past seven years? The thought bothered him more than he would have expected, like a loose thread on a sleeve that he couldn’t prevent himself from tugging at. “If you’d like to know why your sister married Bridewell,” he said mildly, “I think you should ask her yourself.” Maria peered at him more closely. “Do you know why?”
“More or less.” Never from Sophie herself, though—a fact that vexed him more with each passing hour spent in her company. Damn it, he’d thought he could do this—could put the past behind them. Could do her this favor, seize the opportunity to teach his father a lesson while he was at it. Could listen to her laugh, feel the warmth of her hand in the crook of his elbow, converse with her, without allowing his every conscious thought to become fixated on her—on them—on the history they shared, and how it had all gone so terribly wrong. But he was beginning to think he’d made a mistake. Before Maria could ask anything further, there was a great shout of laughter and he and Maria turned their heads to see Harriet and Betsy clutching each other, giggling helplessly as their husbands attempted to fish the ball out of the reeds in the shallow water at the riverbank. Sophie glanced over in West’s direction, a look of resigned amusement on her face, and her eyes caught his for a moment—and in that moment, there was an expression of such intimacy, such knowledge, that West knew a second of uncanny certainty that this was what marriage to Sophie would have been like, that alternate life that usually felt so distant and yet which, in this moment, felt eerily close, as if only the thinnest of veils s eparated it from his true existence. She felt, looking at him like that, like his fiancée in truth, not merely as a ruse. And he did not know what to do with the hopeless longing that he felt in that moment. Something must have shown on his face, for Maria said, “Ah. Well, whatever happened between you and Sophie in the past, it’s clearly mended now.” And West wished, so very, very badly, that this were true. It was in the carriage, on the way home, that he broached the question. “Does your family not know the truth of what happened between us?” Sophie had been reclining lazily against the luxuriously upholstered seat, gazing idly out the window at the winding streets of London they were traversing; the bridge of her nose and her cheeks were a bit rosy, and her hair was beginning to es cape from its neat coiffure, a couple of loose curls framing her face in a haphazard fashion. She looked relaxed and happy. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, however, her demeanor changed in an instant. She straightened in her seat, all traces of ease in her expression immediately absent. “The truth,” she r epeated slowly, her brown eyes fixed upon his face with a look in them that he could not quite decipher. “What truth would that be, precisely?” “Well, your sister seems to be under the impression that I am the reason we did not wed.” “Which sister?” “Maria.” “Ah. I thought you two looked rather cozy, whilst we were playing pall-mall.”
“‘Cozy’ is not precisely the word I would have used to describe our conversation. Did you tell your family that I jilted you?” The question came out a bit more blunt than he’d intended. “As we were not betrothed, it would be impossible for you to have jilted me,” she said coolly. “And as for my family, all I told them at the time was that things could not possibly work between us, which was why I was marrying Fitz instead. I think they assumed it had something to do with your accident—perhaps you no longer wished to marry me, after all that had happened. Or perhaps I feared being your nursemaid.” She paused. “I wasn’t terribly concerned about what they believed, or whether it would make them think poorly of me—or you. I... wasn’t concerned about many things, at the time.” Her voice was soft, laced faintly with a remembered pain. “But I never gave them any details, so anything they may have surmised was not based on information they gained from me, I assure you.” This response, West thought, was notable for omitting as much as it answered. In between every two words were two dozen others that remained unspoken, and he was left not feeling any more enlightened than he had to begin with. All at once, he began to feel rather... angry. West was never angry; men in his position did not have the luxury of losing their tempers, of succumbing to emotions. Or at least, they shouldn’t, and West had always held a particular amount of scorn for powerful men who used anger to intimidate those around them into doing their bidding. But he, apparently, had his limits—and perhaps it should come as no surprise that Sophie would be the one to bring him to said limits. “They’re not aware, then, that you essentially acted as a martyr for Maria?” His voice was careful, even, but there was the slightest edge to it—and a quick flash of temper in Sophie’s eyes let him know that she’d heard it. “That you took it upon yourself to sacrifice your own happiness for hers?” She inhaled sharply. “It was more complicated than that.” “Was it? I recall our discussion at that ball with unfortunate clarity.” She pressed her lips together. “There’s more to it that you don’t understand.” “Ah. And I suppose it would be too much to hope that you explain it to me, then?” Her gaze flicked to his, and held. “I believe you already know the basics—Fitz told you.” West felt a pang at the name, as he always did. He and Bridewell had known each other since they were children, and had always rubbed along well together. West liked Bridewell; he was the younger son of a marquess with more pedigree than fortune, and his expectations in life had always been considerably different from West’s, but even in adulthood, they had shared a drink or a hand of cards at White’s whenever Bridewell was home on leave from the army. The betrayal of this man—one West had considered a true friend—in marrying the only woman with whom West had ever seriously considered matrimony... it had cut de ep. They had only discussed it once, late one evening at White’s, several months after West had recovered sufficiently from his accident to reappear in
society once more. His leg had been paining him something fierce, as it was then still weak and unaccustomed to use. He, too, had been mired in grief and anger—there was the loss of Sophie, but also the loss of David. He’d never forget—though he very much wished he could—the morning he awoke in his sickbed to find his brother there, ashen-faced. It was James who’d broken the news to him of David’s death, and he barely remembered the days that followed, the dark well of sorrow he’d descended into, robbed of the two people closest to him. That, combined with the lingering pain in his leg, meant that he’d grown very fond of a brandy (or three) in the evenings, to take the edge off; he had certainly partaken of quite a few on the evening in question, when he’d run into Bridewell at their club. The conversation had been short, awkward; West, in pain, the worse for a few drinks, and not feeling at all charitably disposed toward Bridewell, had been uninterested in talking, and unwilling to hear what Bridewell wanted to say. “He told me that my father spoke to you after the accident,” West said, looking steadily at her. “Convinced you that we shouldn’t marry. Renewed the threat against your sister—the threat, if memory serves, I told you I’d speak to him about. Had I been given the chance.” His voice was cutting, but she did not flinch. “That is true,” she said simply. “But what Fitz didn’t tell you—because I swore him to secrecy—is that I wasn’t just trying to spare Maria. I was trying to spare you.” “Spare me,” he r epeated flatly. “Spare me from the knowledge that I was too much bother, you mean? That my title—my family—all of it, was too much? That you didn’t trust me to make things right—to make you happy, without sacrificing your sister’s r eputation?” “To spare you pain, you idiot,” she said sharply, and something within him rejoiced to see her with color in her cheeks, her eyes sparking with temper. At least she was looking at him. At least she was discussing this with him, at last. “Yes,” he said, his words dripping with sarcasm, “God forbid I experience any pain, after all, not when my best friend—” He broke off, lest his voice crack; he avoided speaking David’s name, in case doing so summoned any of the memories that he’d tried so hard to suppress: The reckless speed of their curricles. The precarious moment that their wheels had collided, sending them both toppling off-balance. The terrific noise of the crash. The shooting, searing agony of his leg. His howls of pain. And the terrible, eerie silence from David’s curricle. Sophie looked at him for a long moment, something in her gaze softening, but she did not speak, did not make any move to reach out to him, somehow sensing that he would not welcome it—that he could not bear to be comforted, not in these moments when his guilt was so enormous that he felt he’d drown in it. But then, Sophie’s words from earlier echoed in his mind: I do not think David would wish you to blame yourself. And he thought of his friend—his laughing, reckless, loyal best friend, who he had loved so fiercely, and who he knew had loved him just as fiercely in return, even if they’d never once said as much. And he began to believe, for the first time, that she was right.
This knowledge did not erase his guilt—nothing, he suspected, would ever do that—but it made it feel... smaller, somehow. Less all-consuming. He knew that others would have told him the same thing, had the subject arisen—but it never did. He went to great pains, in fact, to avoid discussing it with anyone, and he did not know how to feel about the fact that he felt comfortable doing so with her, of all people. He exhaled a slow, uneven breath. “Your father was going to make our marriage a misery,” she said gently, at last. “He informed me as much, when I tried to visit you.” He felt her words like a blow. “When you tried to visit me,” he r epeated slowly, and his gaze fixed on hers with an unblinking intensity that other women would have quailed from, but which she faced steadily. “You didn’t visit me,” he said, but even he could hear the questioning note in his own voice, the barely concealed yearning, and thought it must be obvious to her how badly he wanted this to be true, what she was telling him. “They told me you didn’t.” Even as he spoke, he realized how absurd this was; had he truly believed this of her? He’d been under the impression, based on how Fitz had framed the story, that his father had paid a call on her—ridiculous, now that he thought about it for three seconds. But at the time, mired in grief and pain, having lost both his best friend and the woman he’d planned to marry in the span of mere days, he hadn’t been thinking clearly. “I did,” she said simply. “And that is when your father made his move.” West gazed at her for a long moment. “Tell me,” he said at last. And so she did.