Page 87 of The Good Girl's Guide to Rakes
“Whatever it is that’s happened between you two,” Finn said lowly in his ear, “you’re in no fucking state to be seen together. Christ, the way you’re looking at her.”
At that moment, Celeste’s gaze found his. She went ramrod straight as color flooded her cheeks. The longing in her eyes ransacked him—and the sorrow in her face nearly made him crumple.
Then she murmured something to her friend, who in turn looked concerned. The two of them rose and made their way down the row until they reached the aisle. Celeste paused for a moment to look at him, her chest rising and falling as if she held back tears, before Miss Carew shepherded her out.
“Stay. Here,” Finn said, his voice taut with warning and his fingers bruising with the amount of force it took to keep Kieran in his seat.
Kieran’s legs burned with the urge to run after her. Yet he stayed where he was, partly because Finn possessed an unholy strength, but mostly because there was nothing he could offer Celeste except the bloody and useless fragments of his own shattered heart.
Heavy footsteps thudded in the hallway, but Celeste didn’t stir from her seat beside the fire in the library. The footfalls drew closer until they entered the chamber and stalked over toward where the whisky was kept in a polished mahogany cabinet.
Saying nothing, she used the poker to stir the fire’s embers. Flames rose up, brightening the room.
“Jesus God, Celeste,” Dom snapped in surprise from the other side of the room. “You nearly gave me the apoplexy.”
“You don’t bat an eye at brawling with an entire taproom,” she noted. “So, it’s doubtful that the appearance of your sister would engender any fear. Bring me a glass of that, too,” she added when he approached with a full tumbler of whisky.
“Since when do you drink spirits?” Despite his question, he did as she requested, and poured her a drink before carrying it to where she sat slumped in an armchair.
“Oh, I’ve been sneaking drams of father’s whisky for years,” she said, taking the glass from him. “You simply haven’t been home to witness it.”
She sipped at her drink, leaning into its burn, yet the spirits did little to warm her, just as the fire hadn’t done anything to chase away the chill. It had accompanied her ever since she’d asked Rosalind to take her home from the theater... was that tonight? It seemed as if decades had passed, not hours.
“Who’s hurt you?” Dom demanded. “Give me their name and I’ll shred them into mince.”
She almost smiled at that. It seemed as though the men in her life believed that physical violence solved any and all problems.
“Make yourself easy, Dom,” she soothed. “There’s naught you can do.”
“But someonehashurt you,” he said grimly. “I refuse to let that stand.”
“You’re going to have to.”
Dom growled, but she stared at him, unmoving, until he relented and lowered himself down to sit on the rug. This did make her smile, how little he’d changed since their days in Ratcliff. The clothing was all Saville Row, and some of the Cockney had been smoothed out of his voice, but there was always something untamed about her brother and its origins didn’t spring from where he was raised. No, Dom was a wild creature at heart, and always would be.
Especially now that Willa was gone.
She inhaled, catching the fragrance of night air and tobacco and harsher drink that clung to her brother’s clothes and hair. Tears filmed her hot eyes—she knew those scents from her evenings out with Kieran, all the secret and wild corners of the city that had been, for a brief time, her kingdom.
She’d never again go to those places, just as she’d never again be alone with Kieran. Never share a private smile when doing something particularly forbidden. Never know his taste, or touch. Was it worse never to have known those pleasures, or was the pain all the greater because she’d experienced and lost them?
Three nights ago, he’d been on the verge of confessing his feelings for her, yet the elation she might have once felt to hear those words was gone, replaced by bitter heartache. It had been even worsetonight as they’d stared at each other across the theater, the naked yearning in his eyes stealing her breath and rending her into shreds.
She took another drink, yet it didn’t soften the edges of her sorrow. Seeing the brooding way Dom nursed his whisky, he surely dwelt in his own misery.
“High times at the Kilburn household,” she said wryly.
“Da always said that blunt would make us happy,” he answered, staring into the fire. “All we needed was to get out of Ratcliff, buy ourselves a fine house, wear the right rigging.”
“We’d dine on venison and drink smuggled French wine, and that would be enough.”
He snorted as he looked at the bottom of his glass. “What’d blunt get us? Ma died, I’ll never be good enough for Willa, who rightly despises me now, and you’re here downing whisky like a longshoreman.” He was silent for a moment, then, “Tell me who—”
“No, but thank you.” She looked at the hard line of his profile that had only grown sharper and more imposing with the passage of time. He’d always frightened her a bit, her brother, and the seven years between their ages seemed to contain lifetimes she’d never fully understand. Shadows lurked behind his eyes, too, and she could only wonder what he did whenever he left the house.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, love for him was a keen ache lodged between her ribs, made all the sharper by the despair that clung to him now that he and Willa had parted.
“Do you remember back before we came to Hans Town?” she asked. “I couldn’t have been more thansix or seven, and I’d found a ribbon, a blue satin ribbon. I tied it in my hair. Then someone stole it, and I came home crying.”
