Page 21 of Courting Trouble
Lord, but she was cold. It felt as though ice ran through her veins rather than blood.
How could she do this?
“Come away with me, Nora,” he implored, his hand cupping at her cheek and nudging to turn her toward him. “I know you’re frightened, but we can be together.”
“I don’t see how,” she mourned, soaking in his touch, in the hope his voice conveyed. Hope she was about to shatter.
“I’ve secured a position in Doctor Alcott’s service,” he told her urgently. “Next year I’m taking the medical exams. I’ve rooms to stay in and a steady income. We’ve a future, Nora. Just pack a case and we’ll leave now.”
“How could you even consider a future like that would appeal to me?” she bit out, her pain at least grating through her throat to lend her voice a harsh rasp that could have been convincing as cruelty.
His fingers tightened, and she was glad she didn’t have to face him just yet, as she could feel him resist the astonished implication that it might not just be her father that would keep them apart.
“What are you saying?” he asked carefully.
“You think I want to live in a dingy room over Doctor Alcott’s surgery?” she asked, summoning all the starched, imperious snobbery her upbringing had imparted to her. “You want me to malinger there while you earn pennies and ignore me for your studies? You want me to raise babies and scrub floors and cook your dinner whilst you toil away?”
She would have done it. Anything to be freed of this gilded prison. Of the walls that closed in nightly and the cage of her parents’ strictures and expectations.
She would have done anything but destroy him.
His hands fell away from her and the lack of warmth against her skin stung like the most unrelenting winter’s wind. “I—I know it’s not what you were raised to want.”
God, she could feel him searching, could sense the frantic scrambles of his thoughts as he tried to catch up with a situation that was unraveling in a way he never expected. She wanted to hold him. To tell him what was in her heart. In her soul. To make him understand what they were both up against.
But she knew him. Knew he would fight for her because he was so noble. So true.
He was the man she wanted. A future with him was exactly what she desired.
“You wouldn’t have to serve me, Nora,” he said gently. “I would keep you fed. I would keep you happy. If you’d just give me a little time, I’d find a way to keep some semblance of the life you—”
“Stop!” She whirled on him, hiding her sob with a slap to his cheek. “You don’t get to keep me at all.”
The expression in his eyes pierced her with more pain than any she could inflict on him. The sheer bewilderment laced with betrayal. The pain.
And then, the hardening of his features as he began to believe…
He’d never know. He’d never understand what this took from her. She might be stomping on his heart, but she was rending her very soul from her skin and casting it into the abyss. She was killing herself in slow increments, knowing that the years ahead would be nothing but torture. That she would be the shell of a woman, haunting a body that no longer belonged to her.
Because her heart would be wherever he was.
“It was me who had you sacked,” she lied. “Our dalliance was a bit of fun, to be sure, but I always credited you with enough sense to know nothing would come of it. And when we were found out due to your recklessness, it became more of a bother than it was a diversion. And so, I think it best we end things here.”
To her astonishment, he didn’t give up. “Nora, this isn’t you! Tell me what’s happened.”
“I’m getting married.”
Her words had more effect on him than her physical slap. He flinched, then froze, his body becoming unnaturally still.
“That’s right.” She notched her chin up higher. “I’m going to be a Viscountess, a small comfort, seeing as how you lost me a Marquess.”
His expression became thunderous. “You were glad when I stopped that—”
“Was I?” She shrugged. “Perhaps I didn’t feel ready then, to be a wife. But now…” Her gaze fell upon the bed where they’d made the sweetest love, so enraptured with each other it was easy to believe that no one else in the world existed. That they could overcome anything.
What fools they’d been.
And now they’d pay for it. She’d pay the most dearly.
