Page 89 of The Secrets of Lord Grayson Child
He tightened his hold on her hand. He couldn’t look away from her unshielded gaze. “What did Ernestine do?”
Her lips twisted wryly. “Exactly what you might expect—she pushed and pushed me to accept another suitor.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t.” She looked into his eyes, then sighed and continued, “Out of that, Mama grew so desperate, she gave in to the creditors’ demands and sold the London house. That gave us a buffer, enough to hold on through another Season, and later, once Julius married, there was just enough left for me to buy the old printing works and startThe Crier.”
She met his eyes again. “By then, of course, we’d fallen out with my aunt, and I couldn’t think of anything else I could do to earn income. You could say that Ernestine drove me to become the owner and editor ofThe Crier.”
He gripped her hand yet more tightly. “Am I allowed to say I’m glad she did? Is she still alive?”
She shook her head. “She died a few years after that. She left us nothing, not that we expected anything. By then, we were well and truly estranged.”
He’d already mentally reviewed the comments she and her mother had made that fateful day, the so-hurtful words he’d overheard and taken to heart. In hindsight, he could see each statement for the appeasement it had been; he could see—could accept—that both Izzy and Sybil had been pandering to Ernestine’s view of how things had to be.
“I…had no idea your family was in such straits.” He focused on her face. “It never occurred to me—would never have occurred to me—that that was what lay behind those comments, but I can see it now.”
She studied his face, then said, “I’m sorry you heard what you did. So very sorry it hurt you so deeply.” With her free hand, she gestured helplessly. “Yet if I was in that position again, had to play that scene again, I would say the same as I did then. I regret each and every word”—her eyes on his, she shook her head—“but I can’t take them back. They might have led to me losing you, but at that moment, those words were necessary, and I had to say them.”
“We can’t go back and change history.” He raised her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her fingers. “So let’s not try.”
Her smile was crooked. “When I think back to that time…I was so full of naive hope and an unquenchable belief in love.”
“So was I.” He paused, then said, “Perhaps I should have done the dramatic thing and burst into the room and confronted you. Or at least waited and asked you face-to-face what you felt.”
“But we can’t rewrite history.” When he raised his gaze to her eyes, she continued, “We were who we were then—younger, inexperienced, and far less sure of ourselves, no matter how we tried to appear. We reacted—both of us—to the situation as we saw it.” She shrugged. “We didn’t know to do otherwise.”
He sensed there was more to that statement than he’d yet heard. “We?”
She sighed. “You vanished, and I couldn’t understand why. I’d thought…I’d hoped… But then you were gone.”
When she fell silent, her gaze distant, once more in the past, gently, he pressed, “Tell me.”
“I felt deserted.” The words fell from her lips, harsh, full of remembered pain. “I felt that the bright future I’d come to believe we would have—such a precious flame that we’d both ignited and, I thought, nurtured—had been cruelly and deliberately snuffed out.”
“You thought I’d led you along, then deliberately left you?”
She met his gaze. “I didn’t know what to think. I just didn’t know.”
He drew in a breath, then said, “Because of that one, accidental moment, we were both hurt deeply. Viewing it now, with the benefit of age and experience, we might have reacted differently and avoided the pain—”
“We were who we were.”
“And it’s easy to be wise long after the event.”
She turned her hand in his and gripped. “Looking back, us parting wasn’t the fault of either of us, or alternatively, it was both our faults. One or the other. But does that make any difference now, with so many years having passed?”
“The only difference is we now know the truth. Each of us loved the other, more or less to the same degree, and neither of us deliberately hurt the other. All we can do—here and now—is put that time behind us and let our misplaced rancor fade and die.”
She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a small nod. “And now?”
“Now…” He tipped his head and found a faintly teasing smile to distract her. “I was shocked to learn that you hadn’t married. Why didn’t you?”
Izzy tried to stop her answering smile. “No other man”—lived up to you in my eyes—“tempted me.” Then she sighed and went on, “And then things got even worse, and we had to sell the country house as well, and the fact we weren’t flush any more started to percolate through the ton. Just the usual whispers—you know how it happens. My second Season had passed with no suitor in sight, and later that year, Ernestine died, and we went into half mourning, which severely limited the next Season for me, not that I was interested in socializing by then. I could see we were heading for desperation, and I started developing my ideas about publishing a small newspaper focusing on the ton’s social events, and then Julius married, and the upshot of that was that I felt free to try my hand at being Mrs. I. Molyneaux, and with Silas’s backing, I pulled it off.”
He nodded in understanding. “So now you have a very different life.”
“A dual life—half in and half out of the ton.” When he didn’t respond, she seized the chance to ask, “What did you do during the years you were away? Aside from finding that nugget, how did you become so very wealthy?”
