Page 66 of Ladies in Hating
Cat’s smile balanced on the knife-edge between love and grief. “Oh, Patience. Yes. She was—” She hesitated, searching Georgiana’s face for a moment, and then went on. “Jem knows this already, but it is not something we discuss freely with others. Patience was a barmaid in the village. She was already with child when they married. My father did it to protect her, and then she died of childbed fever and so—Jem was ours.”
Georgiana blinked, trying to square this revelation with her understanding of the Lacey family. “But that means—why, that means he is not your brother at all, if you share neither a mother nor a father.”
Cat’s fingers tightened on hers. “Jemismy brother.”
“Yes. To be sure. I meant only that you do not share blood—”
“Jem is my brother in every way that matters.” Cat’s face had gone deathly serious, her smile wiped clean. “I would do anything—sacrifice anything—to keep him safe.”
“I do understand that,” Georgiana said again. “Blood is not what makes a family. I know.”
“Yes.” Cat’s grip on her fingers, which had gone almost painful, loosened a little. “Yes, that’s so.” She rubbed her thumb across Georgiana’s knuckles and went on. “When we were sent away from Woodcote Hall, my father hoped that Hugh would join us in London, but instead Hugh went abroad. He was a good man, Hugh, but fearful, too. He was afraid to love my father openly, even among their friends—and afraid, I think, that what hadhappened at Woodcote might happen to the two of them again. So he took a position as a secretary in Italy.”
Georgiana’s heart twisted in her chest, and it seemed hard, somehow, to draw in a breath.
It was a story she knew by heart, a choice she had made for her own family.
Safety over love. Over everything. She could not imagine how anyone could choose differently.
She had to force her response past the tightness in her throat. “It’s difficult. To believe that you deserve happiness when the world would tell you that you do not.”
“I know.” Cat turned her hand over to link her fingers with Georgiana’s. “My father knew it as well. He was the one who forged Hugh’s references for him, in fact.” Her mouth curved up. “My father did not begrudge Hugh when he left, as far as I could tell. He was heartbroken, of course. But he understood too.”
“Your father was a very good man.”
Cat’s thumb brushed across Georgiana’s knuckles. “The best of men. It is because of him that I felt safe to be who I am. To love as I do and not to be afraid.”
Georgiana shook her head. “But your father…” She swallowed back the words, but Cat seemed to understand.
“Lost? Suffered heartbreak?”
“Yes.” Georgiana’s voice rasped.
“I cannot tell you there is nothing to fear,” Cat said. “But it was his nature to love. He could not have done otherwise. And he would not have been himself if he had not prized the stretches of joy more than he feared the intervals of pain.”
Georgiana could scarcely understand the sentiment. Sometimes she suspected everything she did was driven by a desire to protect herself from hurt.
Even her brothers—
Sometimes she wondered if she had cut them off not to shield them, but to wall off her own heart. They could not reject her—not for her career, not for the way she loved—if she did not give them the chance.
“Georgie mine…” Cat hesitated, and her fingers twitched on Georgiana’s hand.
Georgiana’s pulse leapt at the sound of the pet name. At how much she had wanted to hear it just this way, in the light. “Yes?”
“It’s enough,” Cat said. “This. Us, together this way.Youare enough.”
The sunlight through the windows turned the deep brown of Cat’s eyes lighter, a rich amber. Her fingers on Georgiana’s spoke a language that Georgiana could almost understand: wanting and ease together, an unhurried confidence.
And then Cat smiled.
And though Georgiana had memorized it by now—the way happiness looked upon that extravagant mouth—she reached out and brushed her thumb across Cat’s lips anyway.
But as much as she wished to, she could not bring herself to smile back.
Chapter 22
Of course I shall help. Surely, after all these years, that goes without saying?
