“But it is the last waltz!” His bloody mother would not be swayed. “Neither of you have danced a single dance all evening and I am sure nobody here will begrudge the pair of you one waltz.” She pushed Minerva toward him. Despite sparkling in vibrant rubies, her green eyes were hardened emeralds. Cold and hostile. “And I’m sure they will all be delighted to have something to gossip about when you two lovebirds inevitably dance it scandalously too close.” If just gazing at her made his heart weep, holding her would be pure torture.
“When you put it like that, how could I refuse?” He held out his hand and she took it, sending every one of his nerve endings spiraling out of control. But her touch, like her expression, was as detached as their now hideous relationship.
Hugh was in agony. Miserable, wretched, confused agony, and he had absolutely no clue what to do about it as he walked Minerva onto the floor. After enduring a week of her frigid avoidance, and the latent hostility he didn’t fully understand, he had been dreading this. He would have to hold her again—knowing full well he would never properly hold her again. This would be the absolute last time.
It didn’t help that she looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her, in a figure-skimming red silk gown that also, he noted with irrational jealousy, drew a great many admiring stares from the other gentlemen present. Or that she had been aloof toward him since the day he had confessed his feelings toward her despite claiming she felt the same way about him. Or that his blasted eyes had been drawn to her for every second of the never-ending two hours they had been here, enviously watching her laugh and chat with everyone who didn’t have the misfortune to be him.
With him she was coldly monosyllabic. Disinterested. Distant. Even her fingers were stiff in his as they took their positions. He spun her into his arms and she smiled. It was a smile he was paying sixty pounds for, because it didn’t touch her eyes.
He hated it. The pain felt like an anvil on his chest.
The orchestra played the first bars, and she stepped on his foot as her uncoordinated body fought the music. He could feel her frustration at herself beneath his palms and seriously considered leaving her to flounder because she had rejected him, before he remembered his part of this impersonal transaction. They had to put on a show even if he wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to do so.
“Back, side, together—forward, side, together—” He felt her body relax in his arms as she finally found the rhythm, anticipating his movements rather than listening for the beats in the music her endearingly tone-deaf ears couldn’t hear. He loved that imperfection. Almost as much as he loved holding her.
She was content to dance in silence. Probably just as well as he was out of meaningless things to say. They did a lap of the floor, managing to dance such an intimate dance like total strangers—bodies scandalously touching because she couldn’t dance the steps otherwise, eyes averted and souls in completely different counties.
“You need to tell your mother the truth.” Hugh fumbled the next step at the abruptness of her tone. “Things have gone too far. She’s given me rubies.”
Another thing to feel guilty about. “You can leave them when you go.”
“Yes … that’s exactly what I should do. Callous disregard when she has been nothing but kind to me. I hate lying to her.”
“Giles will be back any day. I’ve written to him demanding he return so we can finally end this charade. Then you can stop lying.” While he continued in her absence.
Although the heartbreak would be painfully real. After days of suffering it, the persistent pain in his chest was bordering on acute. He wanted to blame the dress, but knew it was her he missed. Them.
“It was never supposed to last this long. I agreed to stay for a few days once your mother arrived—a week at most.”
“It cannot be helped.”
“She thinks we are … lovers.” As if. “And that I might be already with child … She’s excited.”
Hugh didn’t reply, because oddly he was mourning the loss of that imaginary child now as well as Minerva. Another blasted what-if that would never come to pass.
To compound his misery, he could see Sarah and her husband had just entered the assembly room. Then behind them, Sarah’s mother. Clearly fate or the Almighty wanted to make tonight the most god-awful of his life and send every possible bane to poke his open wounds.
Typically, she spotted him and raised her hand in a wave. He pretended he didn’t see it but wasn’t quick enough to disguise his discomfort from his dancing partner, whose gaze wandered to the spot his had just vacated, and widened.
“Mrs. Peters is here…”
“Is she?”
“You know she is. Why are you ignoring her?”
“We are dancing.” It was easier to deflect than kick that hornet’s nest. “And I am well aware of the fact you have gone above and beyond what you signed up for these last few weeks, but I promise you the day Giles drags his sorry behind back will be the same day you get to leave. In the meantime, leave my mother to me.”
“Because that has all been going so well, hasn’t it? The banns are being read for the second time in the morning and then directly after, I am being fitted for my wedding gown. As I said … this has gone much further than I ever anticipated.”
“What do you want? More money? Name your damn price, Minerva, and let’s be done with it!”
Her green eyes narrowed, hardening further. “Money will not right the wrongs we are doing to a generous and unsuspecting woman! Or to Jeremiah, who has been nothing but lovely. They are moving back here. Did you know that? Jeremiah is selling everything they have in America to be here with us! She is turning her life upside down for a lie…”
Hugh felt sick. This wasn’t just going to leave him heartbroken—it would crush his mother, too. What a hideous, seething mess!
“It will all be over before anything undoable will be done.” He would hunt Giles down and drag him kicking and screaming back to Hampshire if he had to. “There are just a few days left of this torture at most and then I shall repair the damage it has caused.” If it could be repaired, which he doubted. He certainly wouldn’t get over it, and that wasn’t just the loss of Minerva. He had betrayed his mother when she had been betrayed quite enough already—how did that make him any better than his father?
“The extensive damage.” Her gaze bore into his in accusation, and he mourned the loss of their easy friendship, too. How could one kiss and one short conversation so effectively kill all they had? “Very likely unrepairable damage. Tell me, Hugh, was it worth it?”
“No … of course not! I am not a fool, Minerva. I do know I have made a royal hash of things. With hindsight, obviously, I would have dealt with things differently.” He wouldn’t have invented a damn fiancée and then there would have been no possibility of kissing the siren on the beach and offering himself to her. Nothing had been the same since. Everything was spoiled. “I would have told my mother the truth before she sailed to Boston, told her I wouldn’t be marrying anyone or giving her those longed-for grandchildren because I couldn’t! I daresay the guilt of breaking her heart two years ago would’ve been better than all the hurt and pain this sorry debacle has caused me.”
“‘Debacle’? A word which rather minimizes your part in it all. This is all your doing, Hugh. Every last bit of it. And it was entirely selfish.”
Oh, how he loathed his tainted Standish blood!
“It was self-defense!” Agitated, he clumsily twirled her to the farthest part of the floor. Away from prying eyes, listening ears, and the newly arrived but timely reminders from the past currently standing at the refreshment table. “Selfish would have been to allow her to wear me down. To be dishonest and disingenuous. To marry some poor, unsuspecting woman then ruin her life as countless other men in my cursed family have done before me!”
“Because the Standish male makes for an exceptionally bad husband.”
“At least I acknowledge my failings.”
“Is philandering such a glorious pastime? Is that why you cannot make promises?”
“I’ve told you why I cannot risk promises.” Vows were meant to last forever. “The Standish male has notoriously wandering eyes.”
“So you keep saying … although I only have your word on the matter.”
“Then allow me to enlighten you to justify my actions. My father was a philanderer, so was his father and his father before him.” Baring the soul was meant to be cathartic, yet all Hugh felt was anger, frustration, and shame admitting it.
“Aside from you, I’ve never heard a cross word said about your father.”
“That is because he could charm the birds from the trees, exactly as I can, and people only see what they want to see. Myself included. He used that dubious talent to his advantage but irrespective of the feelings of others.”
“He wasn’t a good man, then? Everyone else is wrong?”
“He was a good father. A good landlord. An excellent politician. He was forward thinking and liberal. He did a lot of good. To the whole wide world he was a good man. A great one, even, and certainly better than his father, who was universally hated. But behind closed doors, in his personal life, he was different from the public façade he cultivated and not that much different from his own father despite regularly listing that callous bastard’s many faults.”
Fifteen years of distance did nothing to prevent the bitterness rising to the surface. “Like my hideous grandfather, my father was also a liar who pursued his own pleasures to the detriment of everything and everyone else. He was unfaithful to my mother before he had even walked her up the aisle and continued to betray her throughout their marriage. Something I only learned in the weeks before his death because they both kept it from me!” When they had ripped the floor from beneath his feet, they also tore the rose-tinted veil from his eyes, and ever since he had vowed to himself he would never allow his hereditary defects to wreak such destruction.
“That doesn’t automatically mean you are of the same ilk.”
“I spent my formative years trying to emulate a man who wasn’t the man I thought he was! It is his voice in my head! His blood in my veins! By the time I realized I shouldn’t model myself on him, it was too late. The die was cast. I am more him than not.… Two peas in a pod. Isn’t that what everyone says?”
“They do, but…”
He didn’t want to hear empty platitudes. “You’ve seen all the pictures in the portrait gallery, Minerva. If you take away the clothes, the years, and the name plaques, those Standish faces are one and the same. Interchangeable, intrinsically selfish, and entirely incapable of falling in love or remaining faithful to one woman.” Deep affection wasn’t love. The constant ache in his chest wasn’t love either. The need to make her his didn’t guarantee forever.
“Have you ever tried?”
She wasn’t listening! “I know what I am, Minerva. Up until you came along, I avoided romantic attachments, knowing full well there was not enough within me to sustain them.”
“That sounds more like a convenient excuse for untangling yourself from unsavory entanglements!” Her nose was in the air, and she deigned to look at him down it. “Are you not in control of your own actions? Your own destiny?”
Her sudden resort to sarcasm galled. “I am in control of my own destiny.” Couldn’t she see that was the reason he was being so damn noble?
“Really? Then why do you continually fall back on your Standish blood to justify your terrible behavior?”
“While I am not justifying the huge mess I have made, this entire regrettably misguided charade came about because I absolutely refused to follow in my father’s footsteps.”
“Because you are incapable of falling in love or remaining faithful.”
“I never believed I was capable of either.” Although there was a good chance his deep affection might grow into love if nurtured, and he would have made a damn good attempt at remaining faithful if she had accepted his offer.
“What about Sarah?”
“Sarah!” He stopped dancing momentarily to stare at her, stunned.
“I have eyes, Hugh. Every time you see her, you behave peculiar.”
“Then clearly you need spectacles if you cannot see what everyone in this room does.”
“I see the way you look at her! Why don’t you just admit it. She broke your heart and that caused you to harden it. Perhaps you still love her—or perhaps you still feel guilty for disentangling yourself from her, too? Another unsavory entanglement which could never sully the impressive house of Standish. Because heaven forbid a common woman should taint that illustrious, noble, and tainted bloodline.”
Had she gone quite mad? “I don’t love Sarah!”
“But you did!” She spat the words in his face. “For once in your life, tell the truth, Hugh!”
Several pairs of eyes were now watching them intently, so he took her elbow and steered her toward the alcove. The awful truth might well be common knowledge here but nobody ever said it aloud. Especially him.
“Sarah is my sister, Minerva!”
Her mouth fell open. Then she craned her head to look at his sibling, no doubt taking in the unmistakable similarities. The blond hair. The height. The blue eyes. The same features. All his father’s. Peas in a pod. “I never knew you had a sister!”
“Neither did I until I turned seventeen! The woman over there with her was my father’s mistress.” And once again, although for the life of him he would never understand it, his mother was chatting to the woman as if she hadn’t stolen her husband and destroyed her marriage. “Probably one of many, I suspect—but he moved them both into our house when he found out he was dying…”
He could still remember his mother sitting him down and explaining it to him. That his father’s other family had a right to be there, too, because they loved him just as much as he did. So calmly, as if the walls of Jericho weren’t crumbling around his ears and everything he had believed about the man he had worshiped hadn’t all been a flimsy lie.
Days later, Hugh had had to stand with those unwelcome strangers around his father’s bedside as he took his final breath, holding the hand of the woman who wasn’t his wife while his actual wife looked on like a spectator. His father had died without ever explaining how that horrific and, for Hugh alone apparently, sudden new reality had come to pass.
“I think this gives me the right to behave a little peculiarly on the odd and unavoidable occasions when I collide with them.”
Behind them, people clapped as the waltz came to an end.
“She didn’t break your heart?” That was the single detail she cared about when he had just laid his blackened soul bare?
“No.” Hugh screwed up his face in disgust. “I cannot believe you even thought such a thing.”
“Perhaps if you had been open from the start, I wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”
“I have always been open with you.”
“You allow me to know what you think only if it suits you to tell me.”
“That is unfair.”
“Is it? You are the master of deflection. Constantly making jokes and hiding behind a mask of charm or avoiding real honesty because it…” She threw up her hands. “Really, I do not know what causes you to behave like that—but I suspect you avoid genuine honesty at all costs because it frightens you.”
“I have always been honest with you, Minerva.”
No, he hadn’t.
There had been pockets of brutal honesty spread amongst a great deal of deflection. He was uncomfortable being seen as anything other than what he was—a huge disappointment who couldn’t be trusted not to let people down. “You know more of the real me than most do.” That was closer to the truth.
“Maybe—but I’ve learned more about the real Hugh through your mother, Jeremiah, and Payne than I’ve ever heard from your lips. Tell me—would you have ever mentioned you had a sister unless I had made a mistake about the nature of your relationship?”
“How was I to know her husband’s regiment was coming home? We do not keep in touch…”
“I shall take that as a no. Because talking about her would mean talking about your complicated emotions concerning your father, and why would you entrust anybody with anything meaningful when it’s easier to keep everything superficial! Then blame your Standish blood for everything else.” She exhaled slowly, shaking her head. “It makes me wonder what else you haven’t told me?”
“Nothing of importance.”
Bitter bile rose in his throat at the lie. He still hadn’t told her about her father despite Payne’s daily remonstrance. But how would it help her to know her sire had been within arm’s reach at all times but had ignored them for his own selfish reasons? Or that he had uncovered more unsavory details on the wastrel since he had started digging? Besides, if he confessed he had paid the man off, she would assume he had done it to save his own skin, and admitting otherwise would involve having to tell her again he had done it out of his deep affection for her.
Deep affection?
Perhaps he truly was afraid of real honesty, because he knew in his bones affection probably wasn’t this painful nor was it this all encompassing. He had a deep affection for Payne—it was nothing like what he felt for Minerva.
“You are exhausting, Hugh! And I am tired of it.”
The floor tilted beneath his feet. “What are you saying?”
“That we cannot continue this awful ruse indefinitely. Not when it has run its course and it’s making us both utterly miserable.” She paused, her fingers going to the heavy ruby necklace as she glanced across the room to his mother and his father’s favorite mistress. “The banns are being read again tomorrow. I shall sit through those but I will not allow them to be read for the third and final time next Sunday. Which gives us exactly a week … to either enact the final scene in your story or to face the music.”
Her eyes were troubled, angry, the unfathomable green depths swirling with bitter regret that cut deep. But not as deep as her parting words. “Either way, by this time next Saturday, I shall be gone, Hugh. It is long past time we said goodbye.… In truth, I bitterly regret we ever said hello.”