Page 54 of Courting Trouble
Perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t, if he’d let fate have its way with her so he wouldn’t feel so tethered.
So she wouldn’t feel this agony.
Perhaps they were always meant to belong to something—someone—else. She to her family’s honor. He to his craft.
“You do what you have to, Nora,” he said, his features cast from granite. “But don’t for oneminutethink that you’re protecting me. Because I’d have burned this entire place to the ground if it meant having a life with you in it.”
He left in measured strides. Driven away a second time.
“That’s just it,” she whispered. “I’d never ask you to.”
The Evening of
After a week of exhausting himself with punishing amounts of work, Titus had recently discovered drinking as a simpler anesthetic than constant distraction.
After his second brown ale, the tension in his bones loosened, and the aches abated. After two or three subsequent glasses of whiskey—or gin, if he were desperate enough—he could almost convince himself that he didn’t miss her.
Almost.
Her loss had always been an emptiness he couldn’t seem to fill, but this time was especially cruel.
Because he couldn’t even stay angry with her.
She’d thrown herself on a sword, becoming a martyr to misery out of some misguided sense of honor.
Perhaps misguided wasn’t the word… she’d made some salient points, after all. Fate, it seemed, wanted them to choose between their happiness.
Or the lives of others.
But he was a scientist, goddammit. He was a man who—when presented with a conundrum—reveled in the solving of it. There had to be a way, and if she wasn’t willing to find it, he would.
Perhaps at the bottom of his glass.
“Do you want another one, Morley?” he asked, raising his hand to the barkeep at the Hatchet and Crown. War veterans and officers often took their respite at this mahogany bar, therefore a man with a bleak expression and desire for solitude could find a place to drink unmolested. Men here often wallowed in their loneliness together.
As the chief inspector was a fair-skinned man, his cheeks now glowed with warmth as he pushed his glass away and fought to contain a belch. “I’ve had quite enough, which is still two fewer than you. I’ll have to pour you into a hackney.”
“I’ll get him back home.” Dorian yawned from where he perched on Titus’s other side, and drained his stout. “I’ve business in that part of town anyway.”
“Do I want to know what sort of business?” Morley goaded.
“You probably already do, you meddling cur.” Dorian’s eye patch hid his expression until he turned to flash a taunting smile at them both.
“He said he deserved it,” Titus told the inside of his glass, puzzling over the same conversation for two weeks now. “What did he mean?”
“Who?” Morley and Dorian asked at the same time.
“Nora’s father.” Titus wondered when he’d begun to slur. He didn’t even feel that inebriated. “What did the Baron mean when he said he deserved a punch from me? Why would he say that? Because he put me on the streets? What man wouldn’t for deflowering his daughter?”
“Enough of this.” Morley relieved him of his glass, which still had another two hefty swallows. “It’s only making you maudlin. You’ll be bound to the bottle if you keep it up.”
Reflexively, Titus plucked the glass back and downed it in one burning gulp, before slamming the glass onto the bar with a resounding noise. “One does well to treat an outside wound with alcohol,” he contended. “But it is also an effective treatment for internal injuries.”
“Sound science.” Dorian shrugged into his coat.
“Yes,” Titus heartily agreed. “The soundest of hypothessissiess. Hupothesi? Hypotenuse.”
Suddenly his stomach lurched, and he tried to remember if he’d eaten since breakfast. He’d no appetite lately. No vigor. Everything tasted flat and beige.
