Page 56 of The Lord who Captured Her Innocent Heart
Tatiana’s voice was light and lilting, alerting her humour. Peter shifted. Ella’s name had felt like a punch in the gut.
“Oh, but I’m sure you’ve seen Ella since we’ve been away,” Tatiana chimed in. “We haven’t heard from her, and it’s really caused me a bit of distress. We left days ago, and it seems that she’s already forgotten me.”
Peter turned his eyes towards Frederick, willing him to come up with a better topic of conversation.
“Tell me. You must have stopped by my parents’ estate,” Tatiana continued. “Tell me, how is it? Are Mother and Father fine in the wake of my absence? Ella is such a quiet dear, sometimes. I imagine there isn’t much for her to say to them.”
Peter coughed once before responding, “Why do you think I would find my way to your estate?”
Tatiana allowed her eyebrows to merge together, forming a little wrinkle above her nose. “Well, certainly I imagine that you and Ella have become close friends. I spotted you speaking quite a bit throughout the lead-up to the wedding.”
“Ella and I aren’t friends,” Peter returned, nearly spitting it. “She doesn’t want a thing to do with me. Nor I with her.”
Tatiana blinked at him. Peter knew he’d gone far beyond the limit of conversation, that he’d made himself out to be absolutely wretched. Frederick cleared his throat, seemingly hunting for something to say. Anything.
The waiter arrived back, expecting them to give their orders. He shifted his weight at the table, seemingly unaware of the tension that stretched between the three of them. Peter smacked his hand atop the menu, declaring that he would have the duck and a pint of beer. Frederick ordered the same, while Tatiana murmured that she would have the chicken and a glass of wine. Always, she kept her eyes pinpointed upon Peter as though she didn’t trust whatever would come out of his mouth next.
Peter couldn’t quite name the terror he’d exhibited in the wake of Tatiana’s mention of Ella. The fact that she’d expected him to spend time with Ella, to have seen her mother and father, both excited him and chilled him to the bone. If she’d expected it, had Ella expected it, as well? Was he not conducting whatever “duty” he was meant to all because of pride?
Luckily, conversation fell to other topics. Frederick and Tatiana explained the ins and outs of their travels thus far — how Tatiana had accidentally left her handbag at a restaurant several evenings before and had been in “such a fright,” before the stablehand bumbled back and retrieved it for her. “It was right where I’d left it!” she cried, nearly doubling over with laughter. “That’s not the sort of thing you expect, especially since my mother seemed to drill the information of the world’s terror into me from a young age. Always, she told me never to trust anyone. But everyone has been remarkably kind.”
Somehow, Peter tugged himself through the rest of the dinner, a half-grin smeared across his face. When they arose, Frederick patted him on the back with the strength of a much larger man, a man who knew the great luck he’d been given and wouldn’t spend a single moment taking it for granted.
Tatiana seemed not to have fully recovered from Peter’s reckless speech (the words of which still rang through his skull — “Ella and I aren’t friends”). But she hugged him close, calling him “family,” and saying she would see him soon, surely, after the honeymoon.
“I do apologize for breaking up the events of your honeymoon,” Peter offered. They marched across the cobblestones beneath an enormous night sky. Peter planned to walk the two back to their hotel room, but they paused at the cross-section of the roads, seemingly expecting Peter to carry on without them.
“Oh, but it was marvellous to see you,” Tatiana said. “Really. And — if I should say so…” She paused for a moment, pressing her lips together. “The issue regarding my sister…”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Peter said, his voice strained. “She’s a fine girl. Really. I just know we shan’t be seeing much of one another any longer, which is quite all right with me.”
Tatiana took a delicate step towards him. Her eyes glittered provocatively, in a way that half-reminded Peter why he’d been taken with her in the first place. She drew a wicked smile across her face and murmured, “You’re just like me. You never see what’s right in front of you.”
Then, she turned back around, slipping her arm through Frederick’s. She gave Peter a final nod before marching her and Frederick back in the direction of their hotel, leaving Peter alone, his shadow cast long beneath the flickering street lamp. His heart dipped lower in his chest. For a long moment, he forgot to breathe.
That night, he undressed slowly and draped himself across the bed in his hotel room. In the next room, his father and an old business associate talked in gruff tones. Peter couldn’t make out the specific words and didn’t strain himself to. Already, he ached with what he felt had been the wasted time of the previous days: meetings and false smiles and promises, uttered by his father, about generating wealth Peter didn’t truly believe in. His father wasn’t a crooked man; rather, he seemed to see loopholes in systems that others didn’t. He thought about the world with a far different portion of his brain.
Peter imagined explaining this fact to Ella. He knew precisely the face she’d make as a result. She’d bungle up her nose, draw her eyebrows low, lean into a heavy pout. “I can’t imagine the likes of YOU, Peter Holloway, being raised by a man like that,” she would say.
This would be the greatest compliment of all. It would show that Ella regarded Peter as a far different breed, the sort of man who could outgrow his background.
Or, she wouldn’t say that. For truly, it was all fictional, existing between Peter’s two ears. He would never consciously say the words aloud.
He simply hoped somewhere in the aching in-between of his heart and soul that Ella thought of him fondly. Certainly, Peter had begun to think of himself as a more three-dimensional, soulful person in the wake of knowing her. In fact, he could go far enough to say that if he hadn’t spent so much time with Ella, he might have had a very different opinion regarding the business affairs of his father. Perhaps he would have been able to look at them from a more precise light — with an air of needing to make money, to push for profit.
But Ella hadn’t been the sort to be impressed with that sort of thing.
The following evening, Peter’s father insisted that Peter attend dinner with him and several business associates. It was to be their final night in Brighton before slipping through Coventry and then returning to London for several additional meetings. The men who greeted them at the shadowed restaurant were in their deep 40s, their faces lined with wrinkles from endless years of cigar-smoking. They thrust their nicotine-stained fingers into Peter’s hand to shake it, telling him if he had any similar business sense like his father, then he would go far in life.
Peter’s father lent a false grin, after that: something that showed how very little he thought his son was similar to him whatsoever. That afternoon, Peter had nearly lost them an account, due to the fact that he’d spent the majority of the meeting gazing out the window “like some sort of horrible poet,” his father had spat afterwards.
They ordered drinks and copious amounts of food. Peter ached with the wastefulness of it, knowing that half of it would be scraped into the trash afterwards. On the route to the restaurant, they’d passed countless homeless people — people he knew were scattered amongst London, as well, although he hardly saw them due to the distance of the estate from London proper. How they ached for hunger, whilst men like his father, like the business associates at the table tossed potatoes into their gobs and chewed while they talked.
“And what say you, Peter?” one of them, the stout Sir Hardy, asked.
“Regarding what?” Peter returned, realising that, once again, he’d allowed the conversation to slip away from him.
“Your father here says that he sees your future in business, rather than family matters. I suppose that’s where your father’s heart has always been,” Sir Hardy continued. He shot a bit of beer down his throat, creating a kind of frothy soup within his mouth.
