Page 26 of The Widow's Scandalous Gentleman
“And if she does not feel the same?”
“Then you deserve the heartache,” she replied crisply. “But I rather doubt you’ll find her unfeeling. Merely cautious. Widows often are. We have seen the cost of intimacy—and know its worth.”
Jasper glanced toward the door, where Thalia’s soft laugh echoed faintly down the corridor.
“She’s not what I imagined initially,” he said, almost to himself.
Aunt Iris took a contemplative sip of her brandy. “No one worth loving ever is,” she said at last, as though delivering a final and unimpeachable truth. Cassandra gave a soft, approving squawk.
***
“I find myself wholly unprepared for the intensity of sentiment our circumstances have awakened, Lady Greaves,” Lord Jasper Vexley said, his voice low but steady. “What began as a calculated arrangement to shield your establishment has, I fear, evolved into something far more entangled—and far more personal—than I ever intended when we first conspired to deceive the world.”
He stood before the fireplace in the library, where the last embers glowed faintly beneath a drift of ash. The flickering light lent his features a restless, haunted cast, quite at odds with the self-assured man who had once arrived at Seacliff as a reluctant accomplice to a scheme of convenience.
The hour crept toward midnight. The house lay in the hush of post-salon tranquillity, its triumph still echoing in the silence—yet neither Thalia nor Jasper had sought rest. Sleep, in any case, would have proven elusive with their thoughts tangled in the evening’s implications, and the ever-shifting nature of what now lay between them.
Lady Thalia Greaves, wrapped in a robe of dark silk, stepped closer to the fire. The quiet rustle of the hem on the carpet was the only sound as she met his gaze, her expression carefully composed.
“You speak,” Thalia said at last, her voice quiet but steady, “as though our association has wandered beyond the boundaries we first agreed upon—when this... performance began.” She lifted her gaze to his. “I must ask, Lord Jasper—do you speak from true sentiment? Or merely from the fond illusions that proximity and performance can so easily foster?”
The question, delicately poised, lingered in the space between them—like fog before dawn, difficult to parse and dangerous to navigate.
Jasper’s hands curled loosely behind his back, the flickering firelight painting shifting shadows across his face. “I would give a great deal,” he said, “to be able to make that distinction as easily as I once imagined I could. But I fear that line has blurred.”
He stepped forward, slowly, as though approaching the truth itself.
“I look forward to our mornings. I linger too long over our evenings. Your voice—your opinions, your laughter—has become something I anticipate, not as part of the role, but as... part of my day.” His voice grew quieter. “And the idea of this ending, of you returning to life without me in it... it doesn’t feel like the close of a strategy. It feels like loss.”
Thalia held still, but not cold. Her heart beat sharply, uncomfortably alive beneath her ribcage. She searched his face—not for dissembling, but for certainty.
“I have felt it too,” she said at last, her tone carefully measured, not withholding but aware. “Though I confess I dared not name it. Not out of cruelty, nor indifference. Only... caution.”
Her voice softened, warmed by something deeper than reluctance.
“Widowhood teaches a woman the cost of intimacy. What it grants, yes—but also what it claims. I do not take lightly the shift from performance to sincerity, Lord Jasper. I cannot.”
He nodded slowly, absorbing the weight of her honesty.
“Then I am not alone,” he murmured. “And this is not an illusion.”
“No.” She smiled faintly—wry, self-aware. “Though the timing remains as inconvenient as ever. With your aunt already in residence, any sign of closeness may only invite closer inspection, not leniency.”
Jasper frowned, uncertain. “Wouldn’t sincerity help our cause rather than hinder it?”
Thalia turned slightly, letting the firelight catch her profile. “You mistake the nature of scrutiny,” she said quietly. “Sincerity—true feeling—is uneven. It stumbles, it reveals. And when examined too closely, it gives others the very openings they require to twist it into something else.”
She paused, then added, not without irony, “A polished fiction is far safer. It’s symmetrical. Composed. Easier to digest—and far harder to use as a weapon.”
Jasper studied her, struck not by the mask she wore, but by the quiet bravery beneath it. Whatever she withheld was not artifice, but armour.
“And you fear,” he said slowly, “that feeling—real feeling—would threaten the clarity of the roles we’ve assigned ourselves?”
She gave a small nod, eyes still fixed on the fire. “I have lived so many lives to treat sentiment lightly. Real affection invites entanglements. Dependence. It exposes—often at great cost.”
He took a careful step closer, though not yet within reach. “Surely mutual affection isn’t so dangerous a thing.”
Her gaze flicked to him then, steady but shadowed by memory. “For a man, perhaps not. But women learn differently.”
