Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 59827 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 299(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59827 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 299(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
And I’m crying again.
Not the quiet, contained tears from the plane. These are the messy kind, the kind where your face crumples and your shoulders heave and there’s absolutely no dignity left to preserve, and I’m crying because I don’t understand how any of this is happening. Two weeks ago I was in New York with a ring on my finger and a fiancé who called me boring, and now I’m in Wyoming in a hospital bed with a broken engagement in my coat pocket and a duke’s love confession ringing in my ears, and I don’t know how to hold all of it at the same time.
Lady Hampton squeezes my hand and waits.
Patient. Not pushing. Just there.
Eventually the tears slow. I wipe my face with the back of my free hand and try to pull myself together, which is laughable at this point, but I try anyway.
‘He sat here for six hours,’ I sign to Lady Hampton. ‘While I was unconscious.’
She nods. ‘He wouldn’t leave. The nurses tried.’
‘He dove in after me. Into the water.’
‘I know.’ Her expression flickers with something fierce and tender at once. ‘He’s his father’s son.’
I look down at our joined hands. My fingers are still pruned from the lake, the skin raw and reddish, and Lady Hampton’s hand is smooth and warm and holding mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
‘I’ve been avoiding him,’ I sign. ‘For days. I’ve been rearranging my entire schedule so I wouldn’t have to see him because I’m scared of what I feel, and he knew. He knew the whole time and he let me do it.’
Lady Hampton’s lips curve into that smile. That Mona Lisa smile.
‘And now?’ she signs.
And now.
That’s the question, isn’t it?
Now a duke has told me he loves me, and I’m lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm and a heart monitor announcing my feelings to the room, and somewhere in my coat pocket is an engagement ring from a man who never bothered to see me, and somewhere on the other side of this door is a man who apparently sat in a chair for six hours watching me breathe.
‘I don’t know,’ I sign honestly. ‘I don’t know how to be someone who gets chosen.’
Lady Hampton studies me for a long moment. Then she signs, ‘You jumped into a frozen lake for a stranger’s child without thinking twice. You already know how to be brave, Evianne. You just haven’t figured out how to be brave for yourself yet.’
The words land somewhere deep, somewhere I wasn’t expecting, and I feel my eyes sting all over again.
Lady Hampton squeezes my hand once more, then stands. ‘Rest now,’ she signs. ‘Everything else can wait until morning.’
She pauses at the door, and that Mona Lisa smile deepens into something that looks almost like certainty.
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with the beeping monitor and my racing thoughts and the echo of Veil’s voice saying my name without the “Miss.”
Just Evianne.
Like I’m someone worth knowing by heart.
Chapter Six
“I WAS WONDERING,” SAYS a voice from the wingback chair by the fireplace, “when you’d run out of places to hide.”
I freeze in the library doorway.
Veil is sitting there with a book in his lap, looking like he’s been waiting for hours. Maybe he has. He’s in dark jeans and a grey sweater, legs crossed, perfectly at ease, and he’s watching me with those blue eyes like he knew, like he absolutely knew, that sooner or later I’d end up here.
The library was supposed to be safe. Lady Hampton told me she’d be working in the conservatory this afternoon, and Veil had said something at breakfast about ranch business, which I’d taken as permission to finally, finally have two hours to myself without constantly calculating escape routes.
I thought wrong.
My hand is still on the doorknob.
I could leave.
I should leave.
“I’m not hiding,” I say instead. “I’ve been working.”
“At five in the morning?” He finally looks up from his book, and those blue eyes pin me in place. “Every morning since the lake?”
How does he know when I’ve been waking up?
“Lady Hampton needed—”
“My mother,” Veil says, closing his book with a soft snap, “is perfectly capable of managing her own schedule. She’s been doing it for decades.”
He stands, and I take an involuntary step back.
The door clicks shut behind me.
I didn’t close it.
Did the wind do that?
“We need to talk, Evianne.”
No.
We really don’t.
Talking is what got us into this mess in the first place. Him saying impossible things in a hospital room while a heart monitor broadcast my reaction to the entire medical wing. Me lying awake every night since then replaying every word, every look, every I’m in love with you, like a song I can’t get out of my head.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I manage. “You were exhausted after the lake. You’d been through something traumatic. People say things they don’t mean when—”