Page 144 of A Heart of Bluestone

I pick at the sleeve of my cardigan. “He said you wrote a letter. He didn’t tell me what it said, but…” A one-shouldered shrug shrinks me. “I think he approved of whatever you wrote.”

Eric releases his lips from his bite. A breath of relief deflates his chest. “I only wrote the truth.”

“But…” I shift my weight, one foot to another, a complete mask of ‘oh, I’m so innocent, so naïve, a damsel in Chanel, have pity on me’.

Seems to work on Eric, he likes me best when I’m not sassing.

I loosen a breath through a weak smile. “Whatisthe truth?”

He hesitates.

“Look,” I drop my hands to my sides and fist them. “I don’t know what is really going on between you and Asta, or how deep things run there—but I don’t want to be anyone’s second choice, you know?”

Doesn’t change that I would accept him. Of course I would. Not that I really have a say. But the gentry don’t have the same values as we aristos do. A marriage to a gentry could mean a husband who strays.

Loyalty is absolute among the aristos.

Even if my aristos husband loathed me, thought me as ugly as a toad, and hated every word I spoke, he wouldn’t be falling into other beds. It would be my bed or nobody’s.

Loyalty is everything.

Disloyalty is one way to be shunned by aristos society.

It would be a greater shame to have an unfaithful husband than to have one who is gentry. That is a compromise I cannot make.

“Asta and I…” Eric’s voice fades, quickly, too quickly, and so from that alone, I understand their relationship to be more complicated than he can explain. “We have no future together.”

My gaze drops to the fountain pen on the desk. It leaks ink onto the edge of a scroll.

“Because she’s already engaged,” I say.

Dray and Asta, together, will have unyielding loyalty. So even if she felt the temptation to be with Eric, just once more after she is wed, it wouldn’t come to be.

Dray would kill them both for the betrayal.

But that leaves me with a truth. An ugly realisation.

I am the second choice.

Before my mind can settle with that realisation, Eric adds, soft, “I like you, Olivia. I have always had a fondness for you.”

I aim my moody look at him. It doesn’t soften.

“I didn’t expect your contract to open to the gentry,” he says. “Most of us didn’t.”

Most of us…

I have an image flash in my mind, the picture of gentry guys huddled around a table, discussing the latest contracts like we, the women, are nothing more than shelved items on sale.

He sinks back into the chair and runs his hands down his face. “I didn’t make a move on someone I thought would be forever off-limits.”

“But you did,” I challenge. “On Asta.”

His smile is small, tight. “Her future was less certain. When we met, she was not betrothed to anyone.”

Because at the time, Dray and I were intended for one another, never officially engaged, but an unspoken expectation that ended abruptly on my thirteenth birthday.

It was another few years before Asta and Dray were tied.

---