Page 32 of When Hearts Are Wylde
Hermione nodded. “We’ll postpone.”
“It will be better if the notices come from us,” Cordelia added gently. “It would be unseemly for either of you to send them so soon.”
“Thank you,” Hermione said. She meant it. She also meant to get out of that room before the walls squeezed her lungs dry.
She stood, murmured that she needed air, and slipped away. No one tried to stop her. The street between the houses was short; she had walked it a thousand times. Tonight the air was clean and sharp, lamplight caught in the leftover ice like scattered glass. The cold helped. It bit the inside of her nose and made her eyes water and gave her something to feel that wasn’t fear or guilt.
She turned the last corner toward Brook Street and halted. A man stood just beyond the circle of light, coat collar up, hat shadowing his eyes. She knew him anyway. Her heart did a foolish, traitorous thing in her chest.
Hartley stepped forward. “I heard Randford had been shot,” he said, voice low. “I came as soon as I could.”
She should have been grateful. She was, in a way. It warmed something in her that had been iced over all evening. But it also stung. He came when danger called. He always came in shadows.
“You cannot do this,” she said. Her voice was steady enough; that was something. “You cannot keep appearing only when fear drives you to my door. You cannot look at me as if I were yours and still want me hidden.”
His jaw tightened. He took a breath that looked like it hurt. “Hermione?—”
She didn’t let him finish. “I saw love today,” she said, and the words came out fiercer than she intended. “Not romance in a ballroom, not borrowed lines and practiced smiles. I saw what it looks like to stand in the light for someone. What it looks like to belong to each other in front of the whole world. That is what my brother has with his wife.”
He didn’t move. She could feel his attention like heat.
“I deserve that,” she went on, softer now but no less certain. “You do, too. We both do. So unless you mean to love me openly—without apology, without hiding—I won’t see you again. I will not be anyone’s dirty secret. Not yours. Not anyone’s.”
Silence settled between them, the kind that makes every sound around it louder—the hiss of the lamps, the distant clatter of a carriage, her own breath. He looked as if he wanted to speak and couldn’t find the shape of the words. For a moment she almost relented. Almost. But she could still taste the hours of waiting, the fear, the bruising memory of Baxter’s hands on her life like a stain she could never quite scrub out. Enough.
She dipped her head, not cold, not kind, just final. “Good night, Leo.”
Then she walked past him toward the house, each step a small act of will. She didn’t look back. If he called her name, the wind took it. If he didn’t, it was because he wasn’t ready. Either way, the choice was the same.
At the door, her hand paused on the latch. She drew in the night once more—cold, clean, sobering—and went inside to her mother, to the warmth, to whatever came next.
Chapter Eighteen
Hermione sighed. Two weeks. Two long weeks since Felicity had been taken, since Baxter had met his end in a foul inn, and since Aphrodite Pelham had followed him to the grave with her so-called “accidental” dose of laudanum. Their lives had been returned to a fragile semblance of order, yet all of them were still raw from the experience, some of them more so than others. Hermione had watched her sister-in-law drift through those days like a ghost—gracious, polite, but so coldly distant from her husband that even Hermione’s own heart ached on his behalf. Now it was the night of the ball and a less festive group of people she could not imagine.
She knew Phinneas was suffering. She had seen it in the way he lingered too long at windows, in the shortness of his temper with the servants, and in the haunted stillness when Felicity’s gaze passed through him as though he were nothing but mist. He might not admit it, but he missed her. Missed what they had shared in those blissful weeks before everything had gone wrong.
It was that thought that carried Hermione down the hall and straight into his study, without bothering to knock. She had tolerated the heavy silence long enough.
“Well, you’ve certainly made a muddle of everything,” she pronounced, not giving him so much as a chance to look startled.
“I’m aware of that, Hermione. Thank you so much for pointing it out,” he returned, dry as kindling. “If that is all, you are certainly free to go.”
She did not leave. Instead she crossed the room, closing the door firmly behind her. She loved him too much to let him wallow, and Felicity too much to watch her retreat any further. “I love you, Phinneas. You are a wonderful brother. But, at present, you are an absolute failure as a husband.”
He raised his brows, exasperated as only he could be. “Is this supposed to be helpful?”
She gave him a sad little smile. “Yes. Because the first thing you have to do is admit that you are making a mess of it all and apologize.”
He scoffed, of course. He always did when he felt cornered. “And an apology will suddenly inspire my wife to simply sweep it all under the rug and act as though it never happened? I hardly think so, Hermione.”
Hermione walked closer and perched herself on the edge of his desk, just as she had when she was small and demanded his attention with all the stubbornness of childhood. “You really have no idea what this is about, do you?”
“No, I really do not,” he admitted, the words sharper for the bitterness in them.
“Tell her that you love her,” Hermione said, each word deliberate. “Tell. Her. Now. Before you lose her forever.”
“I cannot,” he muttered, and she heard the ragged edges beneath his calm. “Those words are meaningless. It’s a man’s actions that matter.”
