Page 34 of Forget Me Not

From behind him, she asked, “Is it thedeskbeing in here that bothers you, or is itmypresence?”

How could he answer that? How could he explain in a way that didn’t hurt her feelings?

The silence between them stretched out. He didn’t dare look back at her.

After a long moment, she spoke. “I don’t think I can move the desk back out by myself, and the footman left already.”

“I’ll move it,” he said quietly. “It can go in your room for now. Perhaps you’ll find you like having it there.”

The desk was awkward but not terribly heavy. He carried it through the door leading to her room and set it against a nearby wall. It was not the most logical place for it, but he would be willing to move it once she decided where she wanted it. She followed after him, carrying the chair. She set it against the same wall.

He moved to the sitting room again but turned back a mere few steps inside, hazarding a glance in her direction. She stood alone in her room, looking around the space with a heaviness in her expression that hadn’t been there when he’d first encountered her moments ago.

“You really can make changes elsewhere,” he said. “Whatever you want.” But that dredged up the fledgling panic again. “Within reason,” he added.

She nodded and stepped closer. “I won’t bother you in this room again, I promise.” She set her hand on the door. “In time, I will know which corners I am welcome in and which I am not.”

“Julia, I—”

“Our parents may have forced you to marry me, but I don’t expect you to—” She didn’t finish whatever it was she meant to say. After a quick, tight breath, she closed the door. The latch slung, locking it.

To his frustration, his shame, his confusion, he felt an unwelcome bit of relief. He leaned his forehead against the closed door. “I am trying, Julia,” he whispered. “But I haven’t the first idea how to fix this.”

Chapter Thirteen

Julia knelt on the floorof the round sitting room, using the seat of the Queen Anne chair as a table, papers stacked there and her book of mathematics instruction open on the floor beside her. She wasn’t meant to be in this room—she knew that—but Lucas was away from the house, and the servants had already tended to the bedchambers that morning. She had a few precious minutes to pretend she had claim on this room she so desperately longed for.

“It’smyhouse. It’smyhome.”

Lucas’s words from the day before joined those he’d spoken the day after their engagement had been announced.

“She will be a weight.”

“Ihave options.”

“Julia has no suitors.”

“I do not gain anything by being married to her.”

His dismissal of her weighed on her heart and mind, haunting her steps as she tiptoed around this house that, she began to suspect, would never beherhome. Not truly.

Those first moments at Brier Hill had given her a tenuous grasp on hope. Lucas had sat beside her and so kindly and gently told her this was her home now. He’d either been insincere or he’d changed his mind. In the end, it amounted to the same thing. She was an interloper living in an estate where she wasn’t welcome.

“A weight.”

“It’smyhome.”

She sat back on her feet, sighing as she took yet another moment to simply look over the space. It truly was beautiful. The interior wall was hung in a pale-yellow silk, so light in color it almost seemed white but without the starkness of the truly white walls in her room. A few paintings were hung here and there, all peaceful country scenes. The furniture was clearly not new, but it was cared for. She had sat on the sofa and in the armchair and could attest to the comfort of both. But her self-guided studies were difficult to manage without a desk. Even when she’d taken her book and papers out to the Trent to study, she’d used the obliging flat surface of the well-traversed rock as a makeshift table.

The desk she’d originally intended to place in this room had proven a poor fit for her bedchamber. Try as she might, she could not find a spot in that room where the desk could sit easily without being in the way or tucked into a dim corner. She was absolutely certain the footman had been silently cursing her by the time she’d given up trying and asked him to simply return the desk to the book room. She had kept the chair, though, placing it beside a window so she could look out at the view. It was not the coziest chair for lounging and relaxing, but when used as an odd sort of table, it made working in this room possible. She could enjoy the space, as she’d let herself daydream of doing in those first twenty-four hours, then slip herself and the chair back out with Lucas none the wiser.

She set down her lead pencil, her mind too distracted for the concentration needed to undertake mathematics. For the briefest of moments on that first day at Brier Hill, she’d almost believed they would sort all of this out. Then the very next day, he’d laid his claim, staked his territory, and there’d been no room for her.

“I have options.”

Lucas and Stanley had often sent her away. She’d been too little or too slow. The games they’d played were meant only for the two of them, sometimes including James, but often excluding her. How she’d longed to be part of their fun. Charlotte had been far more content to remain at home, quietly playing with her dolls or reading a book. Julia had enjoyed those things as well but not to the exclusion of running and climbing and undertaking precisely the sort of larks her brother and the Jonquil boys had constantly enjoyed.

All the rejection and insignificance she’d felt each time they’d refused to include her had come rushing back as she’d closed the door to this room after being told she was not welcome.

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