Page 20 of To Woo and to Wed
Sophie. The name he had once spoken so freely, which now felt like a dangerous intimacy.
“All right.” He inclined his head, casting around for a topic of conversation. “Evidently Blackford’s sister told Emily she’d seen us out in the phaeton the other day.” Emily had then shared this news with Violet, who had conveyed it to West—with all manner of inquisitive looks and significant pauses—at dinner the night before.
“Did she?” Sophie sounded satisfied. “I suppose our plan to be seen together is working, then.” She hesitated, and West frowned, wondering what she was considering. “I was surprised, when you took me out in your phaeton,” she said, after a silence had stretched between them for several moments longer than was polite.
He met her eyes. “Oh?”
“I wasn’t sure if—I didn’t know if you enjoyed—after Willingham—” She broke off, looking uncomfortable, but she didn’t break his gaze, and he admired her courage in asking the question (or, at least, attempting to); few people mentioned his accident to him directly, and he never raised the topic in conversation himself. The memories were still painful, even as they’d grown less sharp and jagged at the edges with time.
“There’s a reason I bought a phaeton, rather than another curricle,” he said. He’d not been in a curricle since that afternoon—he doubted he’d ever climb into one again. Despite their reputation for a certain appealing danger, phaetons were safer than curricles—not that he’d be racing, in any case.
She nodded, and cast her eyes down at her lap, where her hands, carefully encased in white lace gloves, were gripping her paper-wrapped book. “I’ve realized,” she said haltingly, “that I never told you how—how sorry I was. About the accident, I mean. About Willingham.”
“But not about your marriage?” he asked, the words coming out a bit sharper than he intended, and Sophie flinched; after a moment he took a slow breath, then pinched the bridge of his nose. More quietly, he said, “I apologize. When would you have had the chance to offer your sympathy, anyway? I seem to remember us taking considerable pains to avoid speaking to each other.”
It was true: In the first couple of years of Sophie’s marriage, he hadavoided so much as being in the same ballroom as her. Over time, he could manage to nod politely at her from a distance, to offer a word of greeting if they crossed paths directly and to do otherwise would have been rude, but at first…
Well, the West of seven—six—even five years ago had not been a man he was entirely proud of.
“You’re right,” she said, looking back up at him now, her brown eyes somber. “But that is not an excuse. And I want you to know how sad I was to learn of his death—to think how much pain it must have caused you.” She glanced sideways as they rolled into the park.
He swallowed past an unexpected lump in his throat; he was accustomed to living with this grief and guilt, but not to speaking of it. “I still miss him, every day,” he said quietly.
Her brow creased. “I never would have thought otherwise,” she said, reaching out as if to grasp his hand, then thinking better of it, allowing her hand to drift back to her own lap. “I believe Jeremy knows it, too.”
Jeremy’s name sat between them, like a gauntlet thrown; West and Sophie had never discussed him, or the events of the previous summer. It had hurt, when West first learned of the affair; now, however, with Jeremy happily married, their liaison having been short-lived, Sophie never having displayed the slightest bit of discomfort in his presence, West could tell that there had been no great feeling involved on either side.
Why, then, did a flicker of jealousy still course through him at the thought of her kissing another man—of her going to bed with him, and having the lazy, meandering conversations that arose in the wake of lovemaking?
He held her gaze steadily as he fought against this feeling, andinstead tried to focus on her words, which he knew had been intended as a gift. “Jeremy and I have only spoken of the accident once.” It had been about a year afterward; they’d both been the worse for drink, though not so much so that he thought it likely Jeremy had forgotten. “He said he didn’t blame me.” He could not prevent a wry twist of his mouth at these words, something Sophie noted with a frown.
“Why should he?” she asked. “No one forced Willingham to get into that curricle—he’d been boasting to anyone who’d listen how fast it was. If you hadn’t challenged him to a race, no doubt someone else would have.”
“Or perhaps not. It was a stupid and reckless thing to do, you know—perhaps no one else would have been so foolish.”
She set her parcel aside, leaning forward in her seat. “?‘Stupid’ and ‘reckless’ are not words I would usually use to describe you.”
Without thinking, he reached out to tip her bonnet back slightly, giving him a clearer view of her face. “Well, I was upset that evening,” he said. “I don’t know that I was acting at all how I usually would.”
She went still; he frowned, reviewing the words he’d just spoken, wondering what had unsettled her.
“You were upset,” she said, very deliberately, “because I told you about your father’s threats to me—and my sister?”
Oh.Damnit.
“Sophie,” he said, quietly and with great care, “you are not responsible for anything my father said to you—or for anything to do with how that made me feel. I’d have been more upset, later, if I’d learned you’d kept that from me.”
“Perhaps if I hadn’t told you about his threats that night, though, you wouldn’t have challenged Willingham,” she pressed, her face stricken.
“And if I’d spoken to my father more firmly in the first place, he never would have threatened you,” he said firmly. He wondered if she could hear the regret that laced every word. “Besides,” he added, “it’s as you said—Willingham was an idiot about that curricle. He’d have found someone else to race.” Perhaps, if he could convince her of this, he’d eventually manage to convince himself, too.
She held his gaze for a long moment, even as they rattled through the park, other riders and carriages flashing past with the occasional greeting from their occupants. West ignored this, though, all of his attention focused on the woman in front of him. Her expression eased somewhat, but she still looked troubled.
“I think there is plenty of blame to be shared, if we wish to continue down this route,” she said after a moment with a slightly forced laugh, and it had the desired effect of shattering the odd tension between them. “It is in the past, I suppose, and there’s no use dwelling on it.”
West, who had leaned toward her, reclined back in his seat, exhaling slowly. He did not wish her to feel guilty for anything to do with his accident—but why, then, did he equally dislike this feigned lightness to her voice, her attempt to dismiss the history between them? Was it because it served as a reminder that, to her, their history was just that—the past, and nothing more?
This was not a question he could ask her, of course.
