Page 83 of Ordered Home for the Holidays
“I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “He was… safe, I suppose. Kind. He made the world smaller, and that felt like a comfort.” She stared at her hands, ashamed of the meagerness of her explanation.
Victor didn’t flinch. “I envied him, you know. Not for winning, but for deserving you.”
Pearl’s heart thudded in her chest—a warning, or maybe a summons. She forced herself to look up, to meet his gaze.
He was closer now than she’d realized, close enough that she could see the faint crescent of an old scar along his jaw, the stray silver threading through his hair, the depth of intent in his eyes.
She inhaled, steadying herself. “You are not what I expected, Victor,” she repeated, softer this time.
He tilted his head. “And what did you expect?”
She almost smiled. “Someone harder. Someone who would judge.”
“Someone who would make you pay for not choosing him?”
The words, so baldly spoken, sent a flash of heat through her cheeks. She shook her head, a gesture halfway between denial and surrender. “Something like that.”
Victor was silent, but the set of his jaw betrayed more than words. The clock on the mantel ticked out another minute.
Pearl felt the urge to speak, to fill the space with something, anything, that would lessen the weight of what hovered between them. But all she could manage was, “Does it ever go away? The feeling of having chosen… wrongly?”
Victor seemed to consider this with the gravity of a judge and the tenderness of a confessor. “I don’t believe in wrong choices,” he said at last. “Only in what we do with the ones we make.”
She let the words settle. They were more comfort than she deserved.
Her hand, which had been worrying at the edge of the cushion, now lay still. She was acutely aware of the heat from his body radiating through the air between them. Her pulse stuttered, then steadied, then ran a little faster.
His hand moved slowly closer to hers, stopping just shy of contact. His palm hovered there, waiting, as if to say, you may have all the time you need, but I am here, and I will not move until you do.
Pearl stared at the space between their hands, a gap narrower than the width of a teacup, and felt the old wall inside her—the one constructed in the weeks after Percy’s death—begin to fracture. She hadn’t realized until this moment how much effort it had taken to keep it standing, or how badly she wanted it gone.
She swallowed, then slid her hand a fraction forward. The distance was nothing. The distance was everything.
Victor’s hand met hers, not with a grasp but a touch, his fingers grazing the back of her own with the lightest possible pressure. It wasn’t a lover’s caress, not yet, but the promise of one. A signal fire, burning quietly and inextinguishably at the center of the room.
She exhaled, and the sound was half sob, half laughter.
He didn’t move away. Nor did she.
After a long moment, he drew back, reclaiming the exact, correct space, and reached instead for her glass. He took it from her with care, his fingers lingering just long enough for her to notice. When he set it aside, she could still feel the echo of his touch, the place where their hands had met.
The clock chimed the half-hour. Somewhere belowstairs, the girls’ voices lifted in a brief, jubilant quarrel, then faded. The house was once again quiet, save for the heartbeat in Pearl’s ears.
She realized, with a kind of giddy terror, that she was no longer afraid.
She looked at Victor, who regarded her with the unblinking patience of someone who had waited half a lifetime for the chance to wait a little longer.
She smiled, this time without reservation.
The wall was gone. The space between them was nothing at all.
Chapter Six
The next day, Victor wore an elliptical groove in the carpet in his study. He muttered, rehearsed, rejected, then muttered again, the proposed phrases of his proposal—God, what a loathsome word, so laden with threat and hope—collapsing into unusable fragments at every turn.
He’d spent the morning in this exact fashion, composing the address he meant to deliver to Pearl by Christmas Eve. He’d written letters to kings and creditors with less trepidation, but the prospect of distilling everything he felt into a single, fatal declaration made him queasy in a way not even his mother could.
Outside, the wind pressed and worried at the glass, setting the leaded panes to shivering. The morning, which had promised clear skies, had thickened into a gunmetal dusk, and the light in the study had become so anemic that the green-shaded lamp above his desk glowed like the eye of a suspicious reptile. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass, jaw set, hair in disarray, the tie of his cravat so carelessly executed it would have earned him a public rebuke from his valet, were the man not occupied with some trauma among the footmen. He regarded himself as one might a stranger, then turned away.
