Page 37 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)

Iris’s efforts with the Renwick papers have borne fruit. Meet me at dusk at Belvoir’s. Please.

— from Georgiana to Cat

Cat folded and refolded the note between her fingers in the alley behind Belvoir’s Library. It had gone worn already—she’d worried her thumb over the crease in the paper enough times that it felt soft beneath her fingers.

She was familiar enough with Georgiana’s hand by now that her heart had leapt before she’d even read the thing, the moment she’d taken it from the message boy who’d deposited it at her apartment.

She’d recognized the flowing script—even Georgiana’s handwriting was exquisite, a fact which Cat took some offense to—and she’d hoped…

She scarcely knew what she had hoped for.

In any case, she hadn’t got it. The words on the page were clipped and concise, and she could almost hear Georgiana’s cool voice articulating the words.

She could not pretend she’d not been hurt by Georgiana’s abrupt departure from her bedchamber the previous morning.

But—hell. It was her own fault. She knew herself, knew her tendency to want too much, to demand more and more.

She had done it with her books, with the pie shop.

She had done it with Jem and his career.

But then again—the thought made her chest hurt—Georgiana had promised. And Cat had believed her.

She’d spent the last two days feeling foolish and angry and raw, and when she’d received Georgiana’s terse little note, she’d been so tangled up that she had not even replied. She’d considered not going to Belvoir’s at all, only…

Well. She had at least pretended to consider it, a small sop to her dignity that she then promptly abandoned by spending far too long arranging her hair.

Before she could lift her hand to knock upon the library’s back door, it came open, and the duchess’s footman grinned familiarly at her. “Lady Darling,” he said cheerfully, “you’re early.”

Oh sweet sainted Margaret, she was. It was awful.

The footman ushered her inside and directed her toward the stairs. “Up to the office. Miss Desrosiers is already here.”

The name, uttered so casually, made Cat’s belly pitch. She could remember what Georgiana had been like at sixteen when she’d chosen the nom de plume: silent, watchful, almost painfully reserved.

And as she thought of the Georgiana who’d stood white and terrified in her chamber the previous morning, Cat wondered suddenly if she was asking too much. If it was unfair to Georgiana to demand that she go against the habits of a lifetime to reveal her heart.

Could she content herself with the pieces that Georgiana was willing to give?

She arrived at the door of Selina’s office before she came to an answer. She knocked softly, and then pushed it open.

The room was dim, lit only by a single candle, and Georgiana stood tall against the bookshelves. Her hair was neatly drawn back, her dress a rich sapphire blue. Her face was very pale, and her hands were locked together beneath her breasts.

The tension between them was instantaneous. The air in the room felt hot and charged. Cat could not take her eyes from Georgiana’s exquisite cheekbones, the anxious shape of her mouth.

“I did not know if you would come.”

Georgiana’s voice was almost too soft to hear, and Cat found herself tugged across the room by it.

“I did not know myself.” They were within a handspan now, and Cat tried to pull herself together.

Tried to make herself stop recalling the texture of Georgiana’s skin.

“You said you wanted to speak to me about Iris’s translations of the Renwick papers? ”

Georgiana’s lips parted on a breath, and Cat found herself fixated upon the faint spray of freckles above Georgiana’s mouth, scarcely visible in the low light. “I lied.”

Cat blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

Georgiana’s fingers released and entangled themselves again, just below her heart. “I lied. I did not know if you would attend me otherwise. I was—I thought—” She broke off and visibly attempted to collect herself. “I was afraid that you would not come if I did not give you a reason.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry,” Georgiana said. Her voice shook, the crisp syllables blurred by the trembling of her mouth, the quick rise and fall of her breath. “I’m sorry, Catriona.”

Cat’s heart pitched, hope and fear together. Was this an apology? Or the prelude to a departure?

Don’t go, she wanted to say. Please don’t go.

“For what?” she said instead, and had to raise her hand to dash at the tears that hazed her vision.

“For how I behaved yesterday. It was cruel of me, and wrong. Every part of it was wrong. I should not have made a promise if I did not intend to keep it.” Georgiana’s face had gone paler still. Her skin looked stretched across her cheekbones, her expression taut with pain.

Cat’s fingers itched to reach across the space between them, but she held herself still. “I don’t understand what you are trying to tell me. You should not have promised? Or you should not have left ?” To her horror, her voice cracked on the last word.

“Catriona,” Georgiana said again, and there was nothing but desperation in her voice. No trace of that icy precision. “I’m not—I’m not good at this. I’ve been trying to practice. But I do not—”

“Tell me.” Cat tried to make her voice firm, but it was stupid and impossible, what with the salt taste of tears in her mouth. “Just tell me what you want me to know.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” Georgiana said hoarsely.

“Do what?”

“Love you!”

The candle guttered. A thin bead of beeswax ran slowly down the delicate white taper.

Cat tried to remember how to breathe.

It was as if all the soft ambient sounds—the night maids cleaning belowstairs, the carriages rattling by outside—had gone silent at once. As though a thick velvet weight had dropped, curtaining them from the rest of the world.

“Georgie,” Cat whispered.

“No,” Georgiana said, almost desperately. “I don’t—you can’t say anything yet. Please, just let me—I’ve been trying to find the words all day, and I cannot—” She broke off, her eyes all shadows. “ Please don’t go yet.”

Cat shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“When we were in Wiltshire, you asked if Ambrose refused to see me after he became the earl. If he washed his hands of me the way our father did.” Georgiana’s gaze fell to the rug.

Her pale lashes were lighter at the tips, gold edged with silver.

“I allowed you to believe it was so. But in truth, I cut them off. Ambrose and Percy both.”

“I see.”

Cat remembered Georgiana’s brothers from Woodcote.

They had been kind to the Laceys—Ambrose fretful, Percy puppyish and exuberant—but things could change a great deal in a decade.

She knew that. She knew well enough that for people who lived outside the bounds of society’s conventions, it was sometimes necessary to protect oneself with separation.

“You don’t see.” Georgiana’s fingers twisted together.

“It wasn’t because of them. It was nothing that they did.

It was because of me. ” She gritted her teeth and seemed to force herself to look up to meet Cat’s eyes.

“When I revealed myself as a Gothic novelist, I knew what would happen to me, but I did not properly appreciate what it would mean for—all of them. For my family.”

“What—”

“I became anathema. Percy’s professor at Oxford saw us together and he—he said that Percy could not associate with me if he wanted to secure a living. I knew then that I had to cut them off. I would have stolen their futures. Their ambitions. Their hopes of marriage. I was poison to them.”

“Georgie,” Cat murmured. “No.”

“I saw the way that my father destroyed your family,” Georgiana said, very low.

“And I saw the way that loyalty to me nearly ruined Selina’s life.

I did not want the same for Ambrose and Percy.

And I—” She hesitated, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling with her breath. “And I did not want the same for you.”

Georgiana’s clear blue eyes skimmed across Cat’s face as though to memorize the sight. As though she supposed this would be the last time.

Cat opened her mouth to speak, but Georgiana’s next words silenced her.

“I have been so afraid that I would hurt you by loving you. Even now, I find myself terrified. Of—everything. That you will very kindly and gently let me down.” She almost laughed, a rough sound, like a sob. “Or that you won’t. That you want me the same way, and I will keep on disappointing you.”

Cat could see Georgiana across from her—the rangy column of her body upright and vibrating against the bookshelves—and also in memory, a decade ago, her fingers wrapped around a cobalt book from the Woodcote library and no trace of a smile on her mouth.

The differences in their stations had been vast. But suddenly, it seemed to Cat that she had been the lucky one.

She had always known that no matter what she chose—no matter how she lived—her father would not stop loving her.

Georgiana—brave and stubborn and obviously, visibly panicked—had never known any such thing.

Cat’s father’s love had been a gift. A foundation for all the many and varied choices of her life.

And it made it almost easy to do what she did next.

She stepped closer to Georgiana. She wrapped one arm around Georgiana’s waist, pinning her back to the bookshelves, fitting their bodies together. Georgiana gasped, and then, when Cat took Georgiana’s jaw in her hand, Georgiana made a tiny, broken sound, halfway between relief and pleading.

“I love you,” Cat said, and she held Georgiana’s trembling body still. “Don’t be afraid.”

And then she brought her mouth to Georgiana’s and kissed her.