Page 17 of Not a Chance in Hell (The Chances #6)

April 17, 1840

“A nd that was when I realized, it was the blue that wasn’t working. Time and time again, I had mixed it, and it was only when I looked at the…”

More words were said. Lilianna was almost sure they were. They washed over her like a slow tide over pebbles, hardly disturbing her thoughts.

Not that she knew what her own thoughts were.

Her Aunt Dodo had apparently decided that, after news that the maid her parents had hoped to send had also been feeling unwell, if her niece did not wish to move in with the third branch of the Chance family, then Lilianna could not be left alone for yet another whole day. Clarke had returned, though, feeling much better and never having succumbed to the fever, so Lilianna wasn’t actually alone anymore. But that hadn’t deterred her aunt. She had sent Cousin Evelyn, who was nattering on as Lilianna held a cooling cup of tea without moving.

Just thinking. Thinking and trying not to think, trying to block out the pain that had been her entire existence since—

“People change.”

“Not you. There was not a chance in hell you could truly change.”

Lilianna’s jaw tightened and she tried to heed the words pouring from her cousin’s lips.

“The trouble is that finding good models, or any models for that matter, is becoming almost impossible. One would almost think that being an artist was something to be ashamed of! I never had this much difficulty in London, but I heard from a friend that even she is finding it a challenge to find someone to sit for her.”

Lilianna nodded automatically as Evelyn paused to draw breath. This was apparently the right thing to do, for her cousin immediately continued.

“I have even considered advertising, though of course my mother would be horrified and I almost think my father would consider taking my easel away. As though I could function without it!”

“Indeed,” Lilianna said quietly. It had been almost ten minutes since she had last said something and it felt appropriate to comment.

Evelyn sighed, cheeks flushing somewhat as she said, “Advertising… It would be a most radical thing to do, and as a lady… Well, I do not believe many ladies have considered such a thing. And yet the men, they can advertise any way they please!”

Yes, men have a far greater freedom , Lilianna wanted to say. Freedom to kiss anyone they like without any repercussions. Freedom to lie, and to steal one’s heart away, then stomp on it so hard—

“Don’t you think?”

“What?” Lilianna said, blinking.

Evelyn was seated on the opposite sofa and stared at her cousin’s rudeness. “I said, don’t you think?”

Precisely what she was supposed to be agreeing with, Lilianna was not sure—but as Evelyn did not appear willing to explain for a second or arguably a third time, she merely nodded her head.

Evelyn sighed. “If I could leave behind my art, then I would, you know. It has brought me naught but trouble, and heartache, and frustration. Yet without it, I don’t know who I am.”

Lilianna’s stomach lurched.

You are not supposed to be thinking about him , she told herself firmly. Thinking of him only brought pain, and she had hoped that taking afternoon tea with her cousin and hearing about her art and the like would distract her entirely from the man she was most definitely not thinking about.

Not at all. Not even a little.

“It has brought me naught but trouble, and heartache, and frustration. Yet without it, I don’t know who I am.”

Unbeknownst to her cousin, she could not have said anything more likely to make Lilianna think of Arthur Nelson, Earl of Taernsby.

But she could give him up. She was determined to. Lilianna was not about to betray herself and everything she stood for and accept back into her life and arms a man who could—

Nausea rose as the image of Arthur, seated at his desk, kissing that woman rose in Lilianna’s mind.

Her grip tightened on her teacup, which shook in its saucer.

She was not going to think about it.

“Last time I had a really good model, his wife got all upset about it, as though I would ever—as though I could…”

Lilianna blinked. Whatever her cousin was talking about now, it was something most peculiar. She had never seen Evelyn’s cheeks that shade before.

Her guest cleared her throat. “I mean… as if I would!”

“As if,” Lilianna said, agreeing to whatever it was her cousin was talking about.

Evelyn appeared to take encouragement from Lilianna’s words. “That is what I said! But she did not listen, and so I am once again on the hunt for a model. I return to London next week and hope to goodness, I will be able to find someone.”

Nodding occasionally, humming agreement and gasping at all the right places, Lilianna found it was relatively easy to navigate a conversation with Evelyn about her love of art without having to give anything she said much thought. It was rude, yes, but it was also manageable.

It also unfortunately left Lilianna’s mind perfectly able to go about thinking of Arthur.

It was almost impossible to believe. If she had not seen it, seen him, seen them with her own eyes, she would not have credited a rumor.

But there he had been—mere hours after she had given herself to him, gifting him her innocence without a hesitation, Arthur had been locking lips with another woman.

“There was not a chance in hell you could truly change.”

“But I love you!”

“Really? I would hate to see how you treat those you say you despise, my lord.”

The words rolled in her mind, unceasing, no matter what Lilianna attempted.

After all her decisiveness not to credit him with any decency, after resisting him for so long, after ignoring those foolish proposals of marriage like a sensible woman… she had fallen for it.

Oh, how could I have been so foolish?

“The curvature of the cheek, you see, is so different to what I had anticipated. I am finding the piece very difficult, but I am sure with the right red—you cannot get good paint here, for love nor money! When I return to London, then I shall perfect…”

Lilianna swallowed a sob as she took a sip of her tepid tea.

She was ruined. Ruined, forever. Not only had she given Arthur her innocence, something she could never take back, but she had risked—after all, they had not prevented… Thanks to her brothers, she knew how children came to be. Right now, this moment, she could be…

A twist in her stomach made her place the teacup and saucer onto a small table beside her. There was no need to panic, not yet. Her monthly flux was not due for another week. Only then would she know—

“You are being very rude, you know.”

Lilianna blinked.

Evelyn was staring with a curious expression, half-censure, half-appraisal. Lilianna felt somewhat like one of her cousin’s models must have felt: closely examined with the expectation that the artist in the family was about to portray her angles and expression onto canvas.

Rude? Rude, me? The outrage!

“I think you’ll find,” Lilianna said in her most icy tone, “that it is you who—”

—is boring me to tears. Won’t stop going on about this art project of yours. Can’t appear to cease complaining about Bath and how difficult it is to find paint, and models, as though those things matter!

Lilianna bit down the words.

Perhaps, months ago, she would have said them. There would have been no need to censure, no interest in keeping someone else happy.

All that had changed. Damn him, he’d changed her. Made her weak.

Swallowing hard, she said softly, “I apologize for my tone.”

Lilianna was not totally sure what she had expected from her short and admittedly curt apology. In a certain light, it was impressive: both that she had apologized, and that she had managed not to say the words that would have so offended.

It was therefore greatly surprising that instead of graciously accepting the apology, perhaps delicately murmuring that it was she, Evelyn, who should apologize, her cousin’s jaw dropped.

“Goodness,” she said, in a most unflattering manner. “I do not think I have ever heard you apologize.”

Lilianna frowned. “‘Ever’ is a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t think that it is,” said Evelyn slowly, clearly giving the matter some thought. “I cannot recall the last time you apologized, to me or anyone else. What has got into you, Lil?”

It was a very good question, and it had a myriad of possible answers—none of which Lilianna particularly wanted to share.

Her shoulders slumped. “Was I really so rude that receiving an apology from me is a surprise?”

It was the perfect opening for Evelyn to immediately reassure her that no, Lilianna had never been that bad, and in fact it was an overreaction on her part.

Evelyn grinned. “Yes.”

Lilianna groaned as her cousin laughed. “That isn’t particularly helpful, Evelyn!”

“Well, I was sent here to be helpful by my mother, and so I suppose I should make a greater effort,” her cousin said breezily, setting aside her own cup of tea. “Besides, I wanted to come and see you. There has been a great deal of chatter in the family about you recently.”

She should have known. If there was one thing the Chance family liked, it was gossip. Well meaning, and often wildly inaccurate, and usually limited to what was happening in the family itself—but still. Gossip.

“What’s the worst of it?” Lilianna said with a sigh.

At least she did not have to worry about a sudden interruption from her mother. Both her parents and Frank were still at Stanphrey Lacey, and her brothers… Well, Lilianna was not sure when they would be returning. “Soon” was the latest from Samuel. Benjamin had not bothered to reply to her letter.

“Mostly, that you have been scorning a very respectable earl and he keeps proposing to you regardless.”

Lilianna started. “That—That is what the family is saying?”

“But I think there’s more to the story,” Evelyn said, her voice softening as her eyes raked over her cousin. “Come on, Lil. We’ve known each other forever. What’s truly going on with this earl of yours?”

Her voice was hoarse. “He is no earl of mine.”

“It certainly sounds like he was, for a time. And you’ve changed, Lil. Not for the worse, necessarily, or the better, just… changed.” Evelyn sighed. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Not particularly. It was still raw, still painful. Lilianna still saw them, the two of them together, every time she closed her eyes. Arthur, pressed up against that chair, his fingers clutching the desk. That woman, leaning over it, claiming him as she had thought she herself had claimed him.

Lilianna’s mouth was dry as she swallowed, but it gave her throat no release.

What happened?

Everything. Nothing. Her heart growing with joy then broken, its shards so delicate, it could never be mended.

“Lil.”

Lilianna blinked through tears she would not shed, and her cousin reached out. Her hand grasped her own, just for a moment.

“You can tell me,” Evelyn said gently. “You… You fell in love with him, didn’t you?”

Grasping the soft cotton of her gown as though that would ground her, Lilianna nodded. “I… It all happened… I don’t really know how it started.”

“I suppose we will just have to get married, then.”

A grin graced her cheeks, despite herself. “I fell into his arms.”

Evelyn’s eyes widened. “I thought Cousin Benjamin was jesting!”

“I mean, it sounds far more dramatic than it actually was,” Lilianna said hastily. “It was a mistake, just an accident—”

“He is devastatingly handsome, though,” mused her cousin. “There was the night he rescued us, but I saw him at one of the Duchess of Axwick’s picnics, last year, in better light. Before he inherited the earldom. Tall and far too good-looking for his own good.”

That about summed him up, yes. “The Earl of Taernsby and I, we… He… He kept proposing to me and for a long time, I believed he was jesting, and—then it felt real. I truly thought he—but then I discovered…”

Lilianna’s voice gave out and she reached out for the now cold cup of tea. Anything, any liquid that could help her speak.

What precisely she would say, she did not know.

Evelyn waited for a moment, then said delicately, “So… So you are not engaged to be married.”

“Not anymore,” Lilianna said, forcing her voice to be harsh.

Because she couldn’t allow herself to feel anything. It would be ridiculous, mourning a relationship that had brought her nothing but pain at its conclusion.

“The Earl of Taernsby,” mused Evelyn. “A great womanizer, I heard.”

Lilianna’s stomach jolted. “I… Well, I suppose so, but he appeared to… I thought he had left that way of life behind him.”

She had believed him when he’d said he wanted a wife, had wanted her. Believed him when he’d told her she was beautiful.

Her fingers twisted together in her lap.

Evelyn was nodding. “A terrible man, from what I’ve heard—and only a Nelson, not from a great family at all.”

“He is an earl,” Lilianna pointed out, almost despite herself. “A Nelson, true, not in the league of the Lindows—”

“Or the Chances,” her cousin said quietly.

“It’s not that—I do not believe that he is particularly below me, or anything like that. I mean, perhaps I did at first, but the more I got to know him…” Lilianna said in a rush. “He was… He is…”

Precisely how to describe the man who infuriated her and dazzled her in equal measure was difficult. Lilianna’s attention meandered around the room, as though searching for insight, yet she could find nothing but warm memories.

Warm memories seared with pain because they were over. She would never experience anything like them again.

“I hear he has a different mistress every day of the week.”

Heat flared throughout her body. “And where did you hear such an egregious rumor?” Lilianna snapped.

Evelyn’s expression remained calm and placid, as though she faced a furious cousin often. “It isn’t a rumor, though, is it? If it’s true.”

“That was Arthur’s—I mean, the Earl of Taernsby was like that, I think, before he and I… He wasn’t like that when…” Lilianna swallowed. “You’re laughing.”

“I’m grinning,” corrected her cousin.

And she was. The smile was almost a smirk, a knowing look that made Lilianna feel silly and uncomfortable all at once.

The grin did not disappear, and Lilianna frowned. “But why are you grinning?”

“Oh, Lil, don’t be so dense!” Her cousin’s cheeks colored, the directness unusual. “You still like him!”

Lilianna almost recoiled from the sentiment. “I don’t.”

“Here I am, giving you half a dozen reasons why the man is someone you should not even pass the time of day with,” Evelyn said quietly. “And everything I say, you defend him.”

Heat was suffusing up her. “I’m not… I haven’t…”

“You like him,” said Evelyn, her voice hardening. “And don’t try to tell me that I’m wrong, because I’m not.”

It was on the tip of Lilianna’s tongue to say just that, but she swallowed, the words bitter in her throat.

Because she did not like him. She did not! There was nothing about him that she liked, and any connection they’d shared… Well, it had just been hopes and dreams, hadn’t it? She’d hoped, and she’d dreamt, and he’d still… he’d kissed…

Lilianna closed her eyes for a moment and the image of Arthur and that woman appeared again.

Her eyes snapped open. “I don’t like him.”

Evelyn frowned. “I think you—”

“I love him,” Lilianna whispered helplessly.

Perhaps in a different situation, the words would have felt triumphant. She would have been celebrating something beautiful, sharing with one of her favorite cousins the beginning of the rest of a happy life.

The words sounded hollow now. Cheap. They could do nothing, mean nothing.

“Who falls in love with a man who would do that to you?” Lilianna murmured, half to herself.

Evelyn’s frown only deepened. “Do what to you?”

There was no possibility of revealing the depths of the betrayal to her cousin. Speaking aloud the words would make it real in a way she could not yet fathom. Accepting it had happened at all had been difficult enough. Lilianna had hastened from that house without any desire to ever return—but telling someone else…

Not for the first time, she wished her sister had not been whisked away to avoid sickness.

“He kissed another woman,” Lilianna said in a rush.

“No!”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she added, bile rising in her throat. “I don’t… He…”

And the pain from that moment reared its head as though she had just caught sight of him mere moments ago. Despite the days between then and now, the pain had not dimmed or darkened. If anything, it had grown, the sense of betrayal fermenting, curdling in her stomach.

“Fine. You don’t want to talk about it. What are you going to do, practice the pianoforte and conversation and attract a new earl?”

Lilianna scowled. “I hate the pianoforte.”

“I know,” said Evelyn with a sigh. “Come on. Tell me about it.”

Lilianna shook her head, no words needed as tears scratched at the corners of her eyes.

“Paint me a picture,” Evelyn urged. “I want to understand. I want to help.”

“Nothing can help,” Lilianna said quietly.

The worst of it all, as though it could get any worse, was that Arthur had done nothing. He had not run after her, or sent messages to her home. He had not arrived on her doorstep, pulling on the bell and banging on the door, demanding to be given entrance so he could explain.

Because there is nothing to explain , Lilianna told herself fiercely. And the sooner I accept that…

“Go on, Lil, paint me a picture,” her cousin said. “I want to understand.”

Lilianna snorted, pain and disdain mingling in the reflex. “‘Understand’?! I do not think it is possible to understand how a man can sit at his desk while a woman, his mistress, leans over it and kisses him!”

Just saying the words was like suffering through it all over again. Lilianna dashed away the unshed tears fiercely, loathing her own weakness. She would not, could not cry about this.

She would not cry over a man who could so easily betray her.

Looking up, she expected to see a look of outrage on her cousin’s face. She expected Evelyn to be mortified on her behalf and start talking about duels and forcing Arthur to marry her…

She would not force a man to marry her, just for the sake of her reputation. How could she look him in the face if she tied him to her?

“It… Well, it sounds to me… Well. Like this mistress, whoever she was, was the one kissing the earl.”

She scoffed. “Yes, he insisted as much. He’s not a gentleman who spurns kisses, I must say.”

Evelyn cocked her head at that, as if about to ask more—like how Lilianna might know that fact about the earl’s kissing habits. But instead, she said, “You misunderstand.”

Lilianna frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, by the way you describe it,” Evelyn said slowly, “and I am not an expert in these matters, you understand… but it sounds to me like the mistress was kissing him, rather than him kissing the mistress.”

“And what difference does that make?” Lilianna said sharply. “They were still kissing! If he did not wish to kiss her, all he would have to do was… was…”

She stopped. She wasn’t sure what she had expected him to do. Shove the woman to the ground? He wasn’t a beast.

“But you don’t know what came before it, do you? I mean, what precipitated the kiss,” her cousin said quietly. “For all you know, he was telling her that there was no possibility they could be together again.”

“Then why would she kiss him after hearing that?”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn said with a sad shrug. “I just… Well, it does not sound like you have the full story. It sounds like the sort of thing you would want to talk to your earl—”

“He is not my earl!”

“—about before you rushed to any particular conclusions.”

Lilianna sighed and twisted her fingers in her lap. She had hardly rushed to a conclusion, had she? She’d seen the two of them kissing, with her own eyes.

It was tempting to hope there was something more to the story. Tempting to think if she’d permitted him to speak, a different story could have been told. Tempting to hope their story could end differently.

“And you love him.”

Swallowing, Lilianna looked up. Across her cousin’s face was an expression of pity, the woman’s small mouth puckered in an elegant frown.

“You love him,” she repeated, “and you are not going to be able to stop loving him, are you?”

“No,” Lilianna said, her voice breaking. “But—oh, Evelyn. How can I ever entrust my heart to someone that I can’t trust at all?”