“Molly, is there anything that can harm the company’s reputation more than what Cunningham has done?”
I scrambled for another excuse, another reason to delay the engagement, but I couldn’t find anything. Because there was nothing, other than my strange, sudden panic that I was casting myself back into the fire after Silas’s financial maneuvering had offered me a way out.
The light had dimmed in Silas’s eyes and his eyebrows un-furrowed. “You don’t want to marry me,” he said flatly. “Is that what it is?”
“No!” I responded quickly. “I do! I do want to be with you. It’s just—you and Julian have made it so I don’t have to marry anyone. Is it so terrible just to enjoy that fact for a while? That I can choose someone of my own free will, at whatever time I want?”
Silas licked his lips, an unconscious habit he had while he thought. My body came alive at the sight of that tongue and the memories it evoked, but I forced my constant need for Silas aside.
“Please,” I begged him. “I love you. But I want some time before I resign myself to marriage again.”
“Resign yourself to marriage?” he repeated incredulously. “Do you even hear yourself? You sound absurd. Marriage between two people that love each other isn’t meant to be indentured servitude or slavery. It’s supposed to be joyful and fulfilling.”
“And I know it would be that with you,” I reassured. “It’s just that I will be ending one engagement tonight, and I am not ready to plunge into another. Not without some time for reflection. I mean, we have all the time in the world, Silas. We love each other. There’s no need to rush into marriage.”
He didn’t answer right away, but then he took a step closer to me, his hand cupping the back of my elbow. It was a gesture that looked polite and seemly from a distance, but that felt possessive and stern and intimate up close. “Do you remember my demand when I asked you to marry me last month?”
I remembered. The Baron’s party. The small private corner we’d found. My pussy riding Silas’s fingers after he coaxed a world-shattering climax out of me.
“You asked me for a baby,” I said.
“And I meant it. Molly, I want a family. I want a family with you. I want your belly full of my children. And I want it as soon as possible. Yes, that sounds possessive and boorish, and I can’t explain it in a way that isn’t so aggressively male, but I love you so much and I can’t imagine having a family that you’re not a part of.”
His words melted me, tugged at me, made me angry with myself for this inexcusable and unanticipated ambivalence. And he was right to want to start a family soon; I was thirty years old and having children was something that shouldn’t be waited on at my age. But I couldn’t just wish this reluctance away. It came from a place that wasn’t rational or logical. It came from a place of deep fear.
“Just give me a day,?
? I said. “One day. To end things with Hugh and to think. It’s all too much right now.”
Silas wasn’t the type to storm off. He wasn’t the type to fight. He was the type to smile and joke and embrace, until the conflict melted away in the face of his sheer resolve to fill his sphere with affection and light.
But there were no smiles or embraces for me right now. Instead, he took my hand and kissed it, and said, “Then I shall see you tomorrow night,” in a cold voice that betrayed how hurt he was.
And then he was gone.
How had I gone from one of the most intense orgasms I’d ever had to abandoning Molly on the ballroom floor? She’d looked so lost and so confused, and yet so determined, and I loved her so much, but I was also furious with her. Hurt by her.
After all we’d been through, after all I’d done for her, after all her noble words about sacrificing everything to be with me—she was scared of actually marrying me? Part of me knew it must be her independence dictating this fear, her need for autonomy and freedom, but what if it was actually because I’d been too rough with her during sex? Or too demanding with my desire for a family?
Or—and I knew this thought came from a dark, ridiculous place, but I couldn’t ignore it—what if it was because she loved me less now? That she didn’t have to marry Hugh to save her company? Maybe I had been the attractive forbidden option, but now that I was no longer forbidden and that she was free of any obligation to marry, she’d realized she didn’t want me?
In a terrible mood—made more terrible by the fact that such moods were usually alien to me—I stomped out of my carriage and stomped into my townhouse, throwing my jacket and hat onto the floor, slamming doors, and growling at any servant that came near me. How could they understand? How could they possibly help?
No. Only gin could help me now.
I went into the parlor and poured myself a stiff glass, and right as I was about to take my first, much-needed, drink, a banging sounded at the door.
Molly.
At this hour, it could only be Molly. To apologize, to rail at me, I suddenly didn’t care. I needed to see her. I needed answers and reassurance and the smell and feel of her against me. I suddenly needed to know that she still loved me. No, more than that. I needed to know that she loved me as much as I loved her. Because I couldn’t bear the lonely reality of being the one who cared the most.
I couldn’t.
But when I flung open the door, it wasn’t Molly I saw but a solemn-looking young man—illuminated in the dim gaslights along the street—extending a small envelope. It took my tired, emotional mind several seconds to process the scene, but once I did, I knew it would stay with me forever: the anonymous delivery boy, the London fog swirling behind him, the innocuous-looking envelope that would change my life.
“Thank you,” I said, fishing a coin from somewhere to tip him. I took the envelope and closed the door.
It was strange to get a telegram so late, and somehow I knew, though I couldn’t explain how, that it portended bad news. It was the lateness of the hour or the solemnity of the delivery boy or maybe even the heavy fog outside, that fog that crept up from the river at night, as if to remind us glitzy, happy Londoners that sterner, ancient powers still held sway over our lives.
