Page 25 of To Woo and to Wed
“But when I am with you, I find myself bothered by all the ways that I have changed. I’m bothered that I am not the man you once knew. I’m bothered that the pain in my leg reminds me of our past—of all that went wrong between us. And I’m bothered that I am bothered, because I have always prided myself on my ability not to let much of anything bother me at all.”
She did turn to look at him now, coming to a quick halt. He stopped as well, but continued to face forward, a muscle ticking in his jaw. He might claim not to let much bother him, but she did notthink this was entirely true; rather, he’d been trained since birth to suppress the things thatdidbother him, to the point that he could pretend they did not exist at all. He’d had this habit when she had first known him, all those years ago, and from what she could tell, it had only worsened with time. She did not tell him this, however—did not know how to do so. Instead, she told him something else that was also entirely true.
“You are every bit the man I once knew,” she said softly; his face did not move as she spoke, but she saw him swallow. “I don’t—” She paused, exhaled in frustration. She had, all at once, both too much and too little to say to him, and the words would not come. “I do not know all that you feel—what you must have felt, in the wake of your accident. But it seems to me far stranger that you wouldnotresent the pain in your leg, and all that it reminds you of.”
Willingham’s death.
Her marriage.
She realized, with a guilty start, that she had spent these past years avoiding the thought of what the pain of those initial weeks and months must have been like for him. She had been mired in misery, too, but hers was of a different nature than his—and at least she fully understood the circumstances that had led to it.
At least she had not lost her best friend, in addition to the person she’d hoped to marry. To dwell too long on what those early months must have been like for him would have been to allow guilt to consume her—even as she knew, stubbornly, that she had done the right thing. That she had protected not just Maria’s happiness, but ultimately West’s own. Even if it had not felt like it at the time.
Nor now,whispered a traitorous little voice in Sophie’s mind.
When he spoke at last, his voice was quiet, a bit more hoarse thannormal. “I do not like to think of the days I lay in that bed, thinking of David—thinking of…”
Thinking of you.
The words hovered between them, unspoken but understood.
“They were the darkest days of my life, and sometimes, when I look at you—when I walk alongside you, as if nothing has changed—” He broke off, inhaling sharply. “I think of the two people I cared for more than anyone else, before that accident, and the fact that I lost them both, in no small part due to my own foolishness, and I can barely stand to look at myself in the mirror.” There was raw pain etched into every word he spoke, so much that Sophie felt the echo of it deep within her, and had to swallow against a sudden lump in her throat. Her eyes prickled, but she would not cry—not before him.
She’d long since stopped allowing herself to cry over this man.
That he should lay the blame at his own feet was suddenly intolerable to her. She blamed the duke—she blamed the emotions, the impetuousness of youth—but she did not blameWest.And suddenly, it felt very important that he should know this.
“I know that our past… is what it is,” she said, very carefully, “but I think you should know that you are not to blame for what occurred between us—you are not responsible for your father’s actions.” She hesitated, then added, before she could think better of it, “And I do not think David, were he alive today, would wish you to blame yourself for your accident.” She paused, then finished softly, “There’s plenty of blame to go around.”
He reached out a slow hand—slow enough to give her plenty of time to pull away, should she wish—and tilted her chin up slightly, so that their gazes met. “If that is true, then I would say the same to you. I blame my father for threatening you—but you were very young. Ido not blame you for being intimidated by a duke, and for marrying someone else instead. Someone whose family would not try to frighten you away.” His tone was bitter, but he held her gaze, the silence taut between them. For a moment, Sophie considered correcting him—telling him the full story, what precisely his father had threatened. If he believed that she merely hadn’t thought him worth facing his father’s hostility… well, she found this close to unbearable.
She drew a deep breath—
“Sophie! Why are you dawdling?” called Betsy from the top of the steps, and Sophie and West blinked, the heavy silence broken.
He took a step, as if to continue up the stairs, but she reached out and laid a hand on his arm to stop him. And then—quickly, without considering the words, or their wisdom—she said, “I think you should know that—no matter what impression I may have given to the contrary—I have never changed the opinion that I formed of you the first night we met.”
“And what was that?” he asked, the words shocking in their roughness, coming from West, who always spoke with such urbane polish.
“That you were the best man I’d ever met,” she said. And without another word, she turned to continue up the sloping lawn to where her family waited.
West had never known it was possible for a picnic, of all things, to be such a joy and such a torment, all at once. Sophie’s family was largely as he’d remembered them, though her sisters—especially the twins—had all grown terribly mature in the years since he’d last been a regular caller at the Wexham family home.
Sort of.
“West, duck!” Harriet shrieked, and he obeyed, a projectile flying past overhead.
“Is that… a loaf of bread?” he asked as Betsy caught it and cackled gleefully.
“It is,” Sophie confirmed from her seat beside him; they were sharing the same blanket, along with Alexandra and Blackford, who had spent much of the past couple of hours mooning at each other so blatantly that West was tempted to ask them if they’d mind finding a blanket of their own for some privacy.
“It’s Pass the Bread!” Alexandra said brightly, sipping a glass of wine in a leisurely fashion.
“I beg your pardon?”
Sophie sighed, but a quick glance in her direction revealed the telltale dimple in her cheek that appeared when she was trying not to smile. “It’s a game they invented when they were children, whenever we’d picnic outdoors; they had a food fight at the dining room table once, when they were about eight—we always dined as a family, even when we were young—and my mother made the mistake of telling them that one did not hurl loaves of bread at one’s sister when one was indoors.”
West immediately saw the logical outcome of Lady Wexham’s unfortunately worded dictate. “Meaning that hurling bread out of doors was perfectly acceptable?”
