Page 85 of Ladies in Hating
The candle guttered. A thin bead of beeswax ran slowly down the delicate white taper.
Cat tried to remember how to breathe.
It was as if all the soft ambient sounds—the night maids cleaning belowstairs, the carriages rattling by outside—had gone silent at once. As though a thick velvet weight had dropped, curtaining them from the rest of the world.
“Georgie,” Cat whispered.
“No,” Georgiana said, almost desperately. “I don’t—you can’tsay anything yet. Please, just let me—I’ve been trying to find the words all day, and I cannot—” She broke off, her eyes all shadows. “Pleasedon’t go yet.”
Cat shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“When we were in Wiltshire, you asked if Ambrose refused to see me after he became the earl. If he washed his hands of me the way our father did.” Georgiana’s gaze fell to the rug. Her pale lashes were lighter at the tips, gold edged with silver. “I allowed you to believe it was so. But in truth, I cut them off. Ambrose and Percy both.”
“I see.”
Cat remembered Georgiana’s brothers from Woodcote. They had been kind to the Laceys—Ambrose fretful, Percy puppyish and exuberant—but things could change a great deal in a decade. She knew that. She knew well enough that for people who lived outside the bounds of society’s conventions, it was sometimes necessary to protect oneself with separation.
“You don’t see.” Georgiana’s fingers twisted together. “It wasn’t because of them. It was nothing that they did. It was because ofme.” She gritted her teeth and seemed to force herself to look up to meet Cat’s eyes. “When I revealed myself as a Gothic novelist, I knew what would happen to me, but I did not properly appreciate what it would mean for—all of them. For my family.”
“What—”
“I became anathema. Percy’s professor at Oxford saw us together and he—he said that Percy could not associate with me if he wanted to secure a living. I knew then that I had to cut them off. I would have stolen their futures. Their ambitions. Their hopes of marriage. I waspoisonto them.”
“Georgie,” Cat murmured. “No.”
“I saw the way that my father destroyed your family,” Georgiana said, very low. “And I saw the way that loyalty to me nearly ruined Selina’s life. I did not want the same for Ambrose and Percy. And I—” She hesitated, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling with her breath. “And I did not want the same for you.”
Georgiana’s clear blue eyes skimmed across Cat’s face as though to memorize the sight. As though she supposed this would be the last time.
Cat opened her mouth to speak, but Georgiana’s next words silenced her.
“I have been so afraid that I would hurt you by loving you. Even now, I find myself terrified. Of—everything. That you will very kindly and gently let me down.” She almost laughed, a rough sound, like a sob. “Or that you won’t. That you want me the same way, and I will keep on disappointing you.”
Cat could see Georgiana across from her—the rangy column of her body upright and vibrating against the bookshelves—and also in memory, a decade ago, her fingers wrapped around a cobalt book from the Woodcote library and no trace of a smile on her mouth.
The differences in their stations had been vast. But suddenly, it seemed to Cat that she had been the lucky one. She had always known that no matter what she chose—no matter how she lived—her father would not stop loving her. Georgiana—brave and stubborn and obviously, visibly panicked—had never known any such thing.
Cat’s father’s love had been a gift. A foundation for all the many and varied choices of her life.
And it made it almost easy to do what she did next.
She stepped closer to Georgiana. She wrapped one arm around Georgiana’s waist, pinning her back to the bookshelves,fitting their bodies together. Georgiana gasped, and then, when Cat took Georgiana’s jaw in her hand, Georgiana made a tiny, broken sound, halfway between relief and pleading.
“I love you,” Cat said, and she held Georgiana’s trembling body still. “Don’t be afraid.”
And then she brought her mouth to Georgiana’s and kissed her.
Chapter 27
Dost thou not know that love banishes all fear?
—from Cat’s private copy ofVÉNUS DANS LE CLOÎTREby Abbé du Prat
Georgiana clutched at the curve of Cat’s waist. Her body sagged back against the shelves, weak with the vestiges of her fear, almost too dazed and dazzled to recognize the slow rise of desire inside her.
“Catriona,” she tried to say, but Cat’s mouth was hot and wet and her hands were buried in Georgiana’s hair.
She gave up on talking. She gave up on everything except kissing Cat back.
