Page 89 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
Tears burned her eyes, and she swiped them away furiously. She knew that. She did. It was just that—it was just that he had become the largest part of her life somehow.
“Don’t shout at me,” she grumbled. “I am just going to shout back, and—and—” And they’d go on just as they had. She didn’t think she could bear it any longer. “You sent me away,” she said, hearing the color of resentment in her own voice.
“You were in danger. Of course I sent you away.”
“Twice!” It wasn’t precisely a fair accusation, given that she’d been the one to suggest returning last eve, but she had hoped—she had hoped that he would argue against it.
She heard the long, drawn-out sigh that slipped from his lungs. “I didn’t want you to be alone evening last,” he said. “Scratch needed to be dealt with, and I had to do it myself. And Iwasgoing to shout at you again if I stayed. Phoebe, I’m likely always going to shout when I’m angry.”
“I’ll shout back,” she said.
“I know. And I’ll apologize if I’m wrong,” he said. And then, doggedly, “But I wasn’t wrong evening last. You put yourself in danger. I’m still furious with you.”
But he wasn’t shouting any longer, and that was something. Not much, perhaps. But something. “Iamsorry for that,” she admitted. “Not for doing it—but for making you angry.”
An exasperated snort. “Never,” he said, “risk your life for mine again. My life isn’t worth yours.”
“It is to me.” The words emerged slightly choked, muffled behind the press of her fingers.
A sullen silence from the opposite side of the wall. Shesuspected they were going to have a fair few arguments between them. They were both of them too stubborn not to.
“Perhaps we ought to save this conversation for when you’re better rested,” Kit said, and she could hear the faintly surly inflection to his voice.
“Perhaps I’d be better rested if you had let me come home,” she countered fiercely. “I couldn’t sleep without you. I couldn’t think of anything but the danger you might be in, couldn’t—” Her fingers flexed, her jaw tightened. “I was so angry with you, so frightened for you.”
“I’m accustomed to such things,” Kit argued.
“I am not!”
“Phoebe.”
She let out a shaky breath. Another long, tense silence, fraught with everything she’d held back these past weeks, everything she’d bottled up inside her. But holding on to the anger would hardly serve her. Servethem. At last, she said, “You never returnedPride and Prejudiceto me.”
A low chuckle as he accepted the diversionary tactic. “It’s half mine now. And—” A pause. “I might have stolen your most recent book.”
“I know,” she said.Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. “All three volumes were missing from my trunk.” She’d discovered them gone when she and her lady’s maid had unpacked her things upon her return to her parents’ house. “Why?”
“You never read it to me. Never even left it out for me to read myself. I wanted to know why.”
She wondered if he’d worked it out. “And did you finish it?”
“I did.”
“How does it end?” She’d not finished it herself.
“The creature drifts away on an ice raft, swearing to put an end to himself, never to be seen again.”
“Oh.” Phoebe ducked her head strangely disappointed, dispirited.
“Oh? Had you expected something different?”
Not really, given the larger context of the novel. But she’d—hoped, perhaps. “I suppose I would have preferred a happier ending.”
“You sympathize with a monster.” And there it was, just the tiniest sliver of understanding within his voice.
“He didn’t ask to be who he was,” she said. “What he was. He didn’t ask to be feared, to be loathed. I suppose a novel like that has got to have a monster, but—but I wonder who the monster truly was. The creature, or the people that made him into one. Perhaps monstrosity is still a matter of perspective. I wonder who he might have been had he been embraced instead of feared.”
Another pause, heavy and poignant. “I’m not a good man, Phoebe.”
