Page 31 of My Darling Mr. Darling

John cleared his throat and winced at the scrape of his knife over his plate as he carved off a sliver of beef filet for himself. “When he died, when I learned the conditions of his will, I felt betrayed,” he said, and this time it was he who averted his eyes. “He had promised me that I would inherit a portion of his business; that I would continue to run it in his stead.” For Violet, of course. All things for Violet. While controlling interest was to have been his in order to prevent less capable hands from ruining the business they had worked so hard together to build up once again, still Violet would have been a very rich woman indeed.

“I was just two and twenty,” he said. “I had plans for my life that did not include marriage at such a young age. I was…angry.”

Violet gave a soft snort, though she was looking down at the strawberry trifle she’d unearthed and not at him.

“All right,” he admitted. “I was furious.” He had been caught, trussed up, and delivered to her like a Christmas goose to a table. He had blamed her for every bit of his situation, considered himself wasted on a spoiled young girl who had not shown her father the proper respect in life and had then been made intohisresponsibility. “I was two and twenty, you’ll remember, and I did not want the responsibility of a wife. And in my fury, I failed to consider something far more important than my own feelings on the matter.”

He let the silence stretch out between them, as thick as her trifle, until at last she looked at him. She stilled as he held her gaze, her fork poised to spear a plump strawberry. There was a sharpness to her face, he thought. The shades of the sprite from the portrait were there still, but so much of that joyful innocence had been carved away by time and circumstances. There was caution there, now, and a certain hardness born of determination. The grim line of her lips concealed fangs she had honed to a razor’s edge—and she would not hesitate to bare them, striking out before she could be struck.

“I let myself forget,” he said, “that you were just seventeen. That you had just lost your father. That you were alone and frightened.” Mechanically he chewed a bit of beef, but it tasted like ashes and grit in his mouth. Her face was a perfect study of impassivity, a mask of complete indifference. But her eyes—they blazed with a righteous fire. With all of the disdain she had learned over the past years.

For so long in his mind she had been that same seventeen-year-old child, lost and afraid. But Violet had grown up with a vengeance. Whatever obsession with saving her that he had developed over the years was sadly misplaced; she had no use for him. None at all. Violet had long since grown accustomed to rescuing herself.

Becausehehad not rescued her. In her version of the story, he was not the savior. He was—had always been—the villain.

“I did think that school would be the best place for you,” he said lamely. “I was certain you needed…tempering. The company of other young ladies. A place to learn, to make connections, to grow. I thought it would provide you the time and attention that I could not.” He stabbed a bit of boiled potato, but could not make himself eat it. The meat sat poorly enough in his stomach as it was. “Mrs. Selkirk’s had a good reputation,” he said. “Churning out the best young ladies, year after year. What the girls there might have lacked in impeccable bloodlines they made up for in exemplary social graces. But if I had known then what it was truly like within that school, I never would have sent you.”

She made a scathing sound in her throat; a dismissive, caustic little noise that told him precisely what she thought of his claim. With a vicious thrust of her fork, the strawberry was impaled—and then it met its demise, snapped between her even, white teeth. Perhaps she had imagined it was his jugular instead.

“I don’t blame you for doubting me,” he said. “I can only imagine how it must have looked to you. But I had made up my mind to collect you in April, after—” Well, he doubted Violet was much interested in what had changed his mind. He pressed his palm over his coat pocket absently and continued, “Suffice it to say, I wrote that I would be coming to collect you within the week, and Mrs. Selkirk wrote back that you had expressed a fervent desire to remain on at the school. I didn’t know—then—that you had already escaped. She did not admit as much to me until July. When my letters to you failed to garner a response, I went to the school myself. Of course, they failed to produce you. I suspect they had hoped that they would be able to locate you themselves before I ever knew you were missing—but you outwitted them, Vi. You evaded them, and they had no choice but to admit you were gone. And I—”

She rose to her feet as if she’d been pulled by strings, fumbling her dish and silverware in the process. “Dinner is over. Please leave.” There had been a catch in her voice; despite the smooth, implacable lines of her face, she could not quite disguise her voice. Above the line of her dressing gown, her pulse hammered in her throat.

Years of etiquette forced him to his feet as well. “What have I said, Vi?”

With one hand she pushed back her tangled curls, wincing as her fingers caught and pulled. Quick strides ate up the distance to the door, and she pushed it open and stood beside it with a flippant gesture. “Leave.”

“First, tell me how I have offended.” When he reached out to touch her wrist, she jerked back as if he had lashed out at her instead.

“I hate you.” The seething whisper fell from her lips into the space between them like a gauntlet. “Don’t speak of me as if you know me. You don’t know me at all. You don’t know the first thing about me. You don’t know what I have done—”

“Of course I do,” he said, and he heard the incredulity in his own voice. Because he had made it his business to know her, had spentyearslearning her. “I’ve tracked you every step from Mrs. Selkirk’s to here. I know you blacked an employer’s eye—Mr. Wright, as I recall—when he pinched you, and he sacked you for it. I know you stole Lady Bellingham’s emerald earbobs when she neglected to pay her staff their quarterly wages. I know you had a short-livedaffairewith a footman, and that you forged your letters of reference.”

She took a swift step back, her lungs working hard as she sucked in air and released it in swift, panting breaths, but he forged ahead anyway.

“I know that you’ve waited tables and worked in laundry rooms and sculleries. I know you’ve lied, cheated, and stolen. I know that Serena is the first person to know your true name in the better part of a decade. I know you could never resist sending me one of your impertinent letters when you left a position.”

She had gone so very still, so very pale. Those deep sea eyes were wide, but blank—like a great yawning emptiness lived behind them, swallowing all of her secrets down into their depths never to be unearthed.

Except hehadunearthed them. It had been a long, slow, arduous process. Difficult to bear, but cathartic in its way. Putting together the pieces she had left behind of herself; collecting them for her lest they be forever forgotten. An odd sort of collection, perhaps, but one he had felt necessary, because she had lost so much of herself already.

This time, when he stroked his thumb over the back of her hand, she did not pull away. His hand cradled hers, as if he could infuse the warmth of his skin into the blistering coldness of hers.

“I’ve chased you across England, Vi, and I was always two steps behind you. And each time I was too late, and you were already gone, and I had to learn where you had been and what you had done, I was…so proud of you. You survived. You never let anyone take advantage of you. You were cleverer than a half-dozen Bow Street Runners. If not for Serena, you’d probably still be out there, making a complete and utter fool of me.” This he softened with a smile, so she did not mistake it for judgment.

Her breath shuddered, rattling in her chest. Her stormy eyes were glassy, sheening with tears that did not fall. She was a strawberry-scented tragedy, playing out before his eyes in every emotion that roiled beneath that indifferent façade threatened to slip away from her. “I hate you,” she whispered again, but it was a ragged, threadbare sound, torn and tattered at the edges.

“I know, Vi.” His free hand slid beneath the tangled mop of curls and cupped the back of her neck, and for a moment he felt her sag into the touch—an undeniable thirst for simple human connection. Out of necessity, she had held herself apart for so long. Because of him. He pressed his lips to her forehead, felt the mist of a cold sweat beneath them. “I know,” he said again. “I wish you didn’t. But I can’t say it’s not justified.” And he let her go and stepped away from her, retracing his steps through the house to the window through which he’d entered.

∞∞∞

Violet closed the drawing room door in his wake, nerves crawling beneath the surface of her skin. In a futile effort to quell the feeling, she seized Mr. Darling’s abandoned glass of wine and downed it in one long swallow. Her hand shook as she replaced the glass upon the table, and the base clattered to the surface of it with a sharp soundthat singed her ears.

Her sins laid bare. The simmering poison of them cut free from her flesh, ripped from her veins. It had hurt to hear them—even just those few he’d uttered—as if every secret had been a hook embedded deep into the meat and muscle of her, and speaking them aloud had torn them out carelessly, with no regard to what damage had been left in their wake.

And yet—

And yet.