Page 46 of To Woo and to Wed
“What did you do?” she demanded in a whisper, alarmed.
“I might have admitted to James and Hawthorne that we’re not actually engaged.”
“You did what!”
“He was already suspicious,” West said in a low voice, leaning closer to her as he spoke; this close, she could smell the sandalwood of his soap, and the scent of his skin—so familiar that it caused a ghost of a memory to arise, unbidden, of his arms around her, his lips on her throat in the corner of a London mansion a lifetime ago. “I decided to take him into my confidence.”
“And I expect he told Violet,” Sophie murmured grimly, the memory of Violet’s peculiar gleam as she’d looked at Sophie that day at Hookham’s making more sense now.
“I would not, ordinarily, make such a decision without asking you,” he said, his voice having grown even quieter—enough so that Sophie found herself leaning in toward him, the better to hear above the noise of the actors on the stage below, and the music that accompanied them. He paused, and added, “Ours may not be a betrothal in truth, but it still seems only fair to treat our arrangement with the same respect that I would, were we actually engaged. And I would not make any decision of import without consulting you.”
His tone was even, but Sophie felt the words like a blow; her gaze locked on to his, and whatever expression was on her face caused something worried to flit across his, evident in the wrinkling of his brow as he gazed back at her.
I would not make any decision of import without consulting you.
Butshehad, seven years ago—was that what he was implying?
It was nothing more than the truth—but a truth that she felt like a knife nonetheless.
She cleared her throat. “I had my reasons for making a decision about my future, all those years ago, and I had my reasons to notconsultyou, too.”
The wrinkle in his forehead deepened. “I was not—I did not—” He blew out a breath, frustrated; it was odd and uncomfortable to watch him struggle for words, he who always seemed so in command of himself. “I did not intend that as a slight, Sophie. I intended—hell.” He broke off, shaking his head, and then leaned even closer, so that his mouth hovered near her ear and she felt the warmth of his breath on her skin. His hand nudged hers, where it rested on the armrest of her chair, the merest glancing contact, through the fabric of her gloves, sufficient to raise the fine hairs on her arm.
“I intended to show you that what happened seven years ago is in the past, and that we might chart a different course. Now.”
Sophie did rear back at this, eyes wide as she regarded him. There was nothing in his face to suggest he was jesting, or sharing a private joke with her. He was not, after all, a man prone to much in the way of laughter.
He’d laughed with her, though. Before. That was one of the many things she’d fallen in love with—the glimmers of a sense of humor in this man who presented such a stern face to others. But if West at age twenty-four had seemed stern on occasion, it was nothing compared to the man seated next to her now. The West she had once known had been soyoung—not yet scarred by his accident, his friend’s death. By her perceived betrayal. It gave her a pang, the realization that she bore some of the responsibility for the man he’d grown into. This was a man she admired fiercely—and still wanted quite helplessly, no matter that her common sense urged her otherwise—but the West she had once known knew how to laugh, even if it was not as frequent as she would have wished.
ThisWest, though…
Even a fortnight earlier, she would have said that she could not imagine the man before her laughing—but now she knew better. Now she knew that she still had the power to pull a reluctant laugh from him, seemingly against his will. And now—dangerously—she knew that she still found this power as thrilling as she had at the age of twenty.
“You cannot think that we have any sort of future together,” she managed, her voice still soft enough not to carry, even as she wanted nothing more than to lock them both within a private room and—
Well, she wasn’t entirely certain what she’d do with him, once she had him there. Shout at him, probably.
Or kiss him.
Or both.
“You have said something along those lines to me before,” he said. “And I cannot help but think that, whilst I would give up much for you, I will not give up the right to know my own mind. Not even to you.”
And Sophie, astonishingly, felt something like shame burn within her.
He, however, looked entirely unruffled by this exchange, and leaned back in his seat, putting some much-needed space between them; Sophie found it alarmingly difficult to speak when he was so close to her.
“In any case,” he said calmly, as if they’d been exchanging nothing more interesting than bland pleasantries about the weather, “it occurs to me that if Violet and James have grown suspicious of our behavior, then we run the risk of others becoming so as well.”
“Well,” she managed, her thoughts still in a tangle, “if you would see fit to stop comparing me to root vegetables, we might stand a better chance of convincing them.”
He didn’t laugh, but the lines at the corners of his eyes deepened as he looked at her, and she found she couldn’t look away. It reminded her at once of the numerous occasions during that first spring when they’d been courting, when he’d catch her eye across a crowded room, or from the opposite end of a dinner table, and they’d share some unspoken joke, communicating solely through a quirk of the mouth or the raising of an eyebrow. It had felt like they held an entire private universe between them.
She had known, even then, that she was lucky to have found this with someone; it was only now, seven years later, with the bitterness of experience, that she knew preciselyhowlucky.
She could not afford to allow her thoughts to drift along these lines. She needed to remind him of what she was prepared to offer—an offer that she knew he would not take.
“There’s one way to ensure that we’re a bit more convincing, you know,” she said quietly, tilting her head and leaning forward once more so that her words landed softly on the sliver of exposed skin just beneath his ear.
