Page 28 of To Woo and to Wed
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 escape 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 repeated 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 thatIam 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. WestlikedBridewell; he was the younger son of a marquess with more pedigree than fortune, and his expectations in lifehad 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 deep. 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, Itoldyou 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 spareyou.”
“Spare me,” he repeated 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 reputation?”
“To spare youpain,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 anypain, 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.
