An Honorable Deception (The Imposters #3)

Chapter 13

THIRTEEN

S traw cushioned her fall, tickled her face, and was even gracious enough to flutter down over her in a shielding blanket that Lavinia would have been perfectly content to hide under for a few itchy moments.

Yates was already there. Brushing the straw away, all too quickly showing her the face that was so very worried that her heart squeezed as it had done a moment before. Which was what sent her over backward to begin with, totally forgetting there was no wall there to catch her.

Not her heart—not like he’d think. But her heart . Because he was so Yates . An earl, mucking a leopard’s stall. Picking her up like she was no bigger than Penelope so that he didn’t smear her with things she’d rather not contemplate. Smiling at her like he understood every thought she had and liked her anyway. So concerned for her well-being that he was there on his knees by her side, panic in his every movement, a feverish light in his eyes.

She’d meant to do exactly what she promised. Step aside. Relegate herself to a different part of his life. Be the sort of friend Marigold said she should be.

But Marigold’s whole concern had been that she would break Yates’s heart—and that was the last thing she wanted to do. But why did not hurting him mean staying away? Why couldn’t it mean something different? Why couldn’t it mean loving him?

That was the thought that had sent her leaning back, and then tumbling, and it held her immobile as he bent over her now, Penelope still on his back and peeping at Lavinia over his shoulder. The little monkey must not have thought this nearly as interesting as mucking stalls, because she jumped to the half wall with a hoot.

She needed to regain her breath. Assure him she was fine. Sit up and dust the straw from herself.

But his hand moved over the back of her head, checking for injuries, and the other settled on her throat, where her pulse hammered. His fault. Perfectly healthy response. What else was she supposed to do when he hovered over her like that?

“What happened? Are you all right? Speak to me.” His questions tumbled over one another, not giving her any room to answer, even if she’d had words to do so. “It’s your heart, isn’t it? It’s racing. Although you did fall off a wall—but before that. You were in pain.”

Not exactly the right word. But not so far off. And how did he expect her to be able to answer him when his one hand still cradled her head and the other rested over her collar bone, fingertips tracking her heartbeat?

She had to try, though, and managed to croak out, “I’m fine.” She sounded like an absolute ninny, breathless and faint.

His brows knit together so furiously she wondered if they’d ever smooth out again. “You’re not fine. Your pulse isn’t slowing. Deep breaths.”

She obediently drew one in, but that made her chest rise, which made her aware of his palm, which did not help.

He looked about ready to fall to pieces. “Should I go for the doctor?”

“No!” Gracious, what could Dr. Evans possibly do about this? Her eyes slid shut to block out Yates’s earnest expression.

Probably a bad idea. “Vinny! Open your eyes. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to help.”

She opened them again, but that didn’t help either. He was still Yates, and he was so close, and all she could think about was that winter cliff when they were seventeen, when she’d had her chance at happiness and then had thrown it away. Why had she let her mother dissuade her? Why had she believed the horrid words she’d spoken? She ought to have been his wife by now, years ago. She ought to have been in love with him all this time. She ought to know, when she looked up at his face so close to hers, that he was hers and she was his, and that there was no reason in the world to keep her distance.

“Kiss me.” She’d only meant to think it, but she must have spoken it out loud, because his eyes went dark and his fingertips pressed her throat.

“What?”

Well, he had been the one to kiss her before—only fair that it was her turn. Since she’d brought it up. And she had but to move her head the slightest bit, given how close he was hovering. Her hand lifted and settled at the back of his head without her even needing to think the command, pulling him down to meet her.

His hair was damp against her fingers, and his lips were warm against hers. She kissed him as he’d kissed her before, a soft caress that she prayed said things she otherwise couldn’t. No doubt her pulse thundered still more.

But then she realized, after only a few seconds, that he wasn’t kissing her back. Wasn’t pulling her close. Regret flared up, made her pull away, burned her eyes. “Yates. I—”

Then he was kissing her, and the regret vanished beneath the other feelings. His arms came around her, lifted her from the floor, and it was at once familiar and not—arms she knew in a hold she didn’t, a hold she knew in arms far stronger than they’d been.

They felt like home, and like adventure, like the best memories and the brightest tomorrow. His kiss, hungry and gentle, made her head go light and her stomach go heavy, and she wrapped her arms around him and held on as if she might float away otherwise.

It could have been a second. A minute. A year. An infinite, unmeasured moment of the purest happiness she’d ever felt in her life, all the dreams she’d told herself were impossible elbowing for space in her heart again.

Then he was a step away, arms setting her back instead of holding her close, and the anxiousness of his expression when she fell turned to fury.

Fury as dark and pure as her happiness had been momentarily bright. “What are you doing, Lavinia?”

His tone was a slap, though he’d pushed her away with gentleness. No doubt her cheeks were every bit as flushed as they felt, and her neck had probably gone splotchy first from straw and now humiliation. Her hand went to her throat, which again felt too tight for words. “I...”

He shoved a hand through his hair, muttering something low and harsh in Romani, and edged back another step. “We’re not doing this again. I worked for six blighted years to get you out of my heart, and I did it, and you’re not going to undo that because you...” He grimaced. “Whatever made you do that.”

She edged back a step, too, wishing the mound of clean straw would swallow her whole. “I’m sorry.” What had she been thinking?

She loved him—that’s what she’d been thinking. That he made her feel safe and made her laugh and made her believe that life could be something more than shadows and secrets and emptiness.

He didn’t even seem to hear her apology. He paced the opening of the stall, though it was only two steps back and forth. “You think I don’t know your opinion about matters of the heart? That if ever you feel it, you run the other way?”

Had she told him that? She’d told Marigold—but surely Marigold hadn’t shared the conversation with her brother. Perhaps he’d overheard something, though. She’d no doubt reiterated her defensive position at some point in the past year, and she knew now he was a professional when it came to eavesdropping.

“But it’s you .” He wasn’t like the other men, men she didn’t know, men she couldn’t trust. She knew his secrets. They were honorable. “You’re ... safe.”

He scoffed a laugh. “Right. Don’t have to worry about falling in love with me , do you? Your heart is safe.”

She frowned so intently it made her head hurt. “Exactly.” But why did he make it sound like such a horrible thing?

When he faced her again, his face had drained of all its fury, all his concern, all his everything. It was a blank mask. Hard, forbidding. “I deserve better than that.”

Better than her heart? Better than her .

Shame swallowed her where the straw hadn’t. Alethia. How had she forgotten Alethia? It was true that he’d only met their new friend a bit over a week ago, but she’d never seen that look in his eyes when he looked at anyone else. He’d already set his mind that direction. His heart.

And then Lavinia had thrown herself at him. She must seem an utter wretch. As if she’d deliberately tried to test him or to hurt him. How else would he see it? He knew she knew how he felt about Alethia; she’d said so last night.

Her nose ached with building pressure, and she knew that any moment she was going to burst into humiliated sobs, but he was blocking the only exit from the stall, so what could she do but keep standing here? “I’m sorry.” Even she could barely hear the strangled whisper. “Forgive me.”

His jaw ticked. He regarded her for another moment, then spun and stepped out of the stall. “We’ll have to leave here at one to make the afternoon train to London. Be ready.”

“We’re still going?”

He moved back into the neighboring stall and reached for his pitchfork again. “We have a job to do. As for this...” He glanced her way over the half wall, his eyes still dark and storming. “Pretend it never happened. We both know you can do that.”

She deserved that parting jab. She deserved the disdain in his eyes. She deserved the lashing of the rain as she fled the stables, grateful that the growing storm would cover the sound of the cry she couldn’t hold back another second.

She’d left the magazine wherever she’d dropped it when she fell, but that was for the best, no doubt. It would have gotten soaked as she stood there, halfway between stables and house, without a clue as to where she meant to go.

Not inside, where someone might notice that it was tears tracking her cheeks, not rain. Not out here, where Yates would see her the moment he finished his chores. Not the gymnasium, where for all she knew he meant to return to work off his anger with her.

That left one outbuilding. She ran through the mud toward the theater. The doors weren’t locked, but it was dark inside, with that musty smell of an English building left too long without anything to chase away the damp.

It smelled like the unused rooms at the Abbey, where she’d sneak off as a child to play.

She pulled the door closed behind her and let the darkness settle again. Enough light filtered through the windows of the small lobby to reveal the rows of seats before the stage, and she moved to one, lowered the wooden seat, and sat on it.

The tears didn’t slow, much as she tried to muffle them so she didn’t have to hear her own sobs echoing back at her in the theater.

She was so pathetic. Had she really thought she could kiss him and make the last six years magically disappear? And the ones before it, too, when she’d ignored his affections? Did she think her heart, weak and broken and bruised, was good enough for him, when his was so big, so strong, so open?

So perfect for someone else. Someone who needed that bigness, that strength, that openness. Someone who could accept it without making him remember how she’d first rejected him. Someone who deserved him, who could make him happy in return.

She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them to anchor them there, her heels on the edge of the seat. She didn’t want to step aside so he and Alethia could fall in love. She didn’t want to watch the way they looked at each other. She didn’t want to go back to her own empty house and know that silent rooms were all she’d ever have in life.

She was only twenty-three. Healthy now. Years stretched out ahead of her. She just didn’t know what they could possibly offer. Yates didn’t want her. And when Marigold learned what she’d done, she’d likely ban her from the Tower forever.

Her eyes squeezed shut, she tried to laugh away the sobs. Marigold had been right. And she’d been wrong too. Lavinia had indeed repeated the same mistakes she’d made before—but she’d be the one paying the price with a broken heart this time. Not Yates.

Fitting.

She sat there until the tears finally slowed, until her breathing was back to normal. There’d be no hope for her eyes, which felt puffy and were doubtlessly red. But she hadn’t any more time to waste on self-pity. She unfurled and let herself back out of the theater.

The rain had relented from its downpour, but it was still a steady shower that soaked her through anew as she trudged to the house. She went to the back door, which stuck like it always did, but she managed to wrestle it open.

Once inside, she paused, listening. There were voices in the kitchen, so she wouldn’t go that way. She slipped off her muddy shoes and tiptoed toward the servants’ stairs. No one stopped her or even spotted her before she reached her room. Good.

She bathed, dressed in dry clothes, and pinned up her hair for the first time in days. The mirror she avoided, though. She didn’t want to see how bad she looked.

Now what? She ought to talk to Marigold about costuming, but the thought of facing her friend made her chest go tight. Marigold would see through her in a heartbeat. She’d know that she’d done the very thing she’d told her not to do. And she’d already made her opinion on the matter clear.

Instead, she rummaged through the items still in her trunk and pulled out the books she’d packed first for London and then for the Tower. The novel held little appeal, but she sat down and let two of the others rest in her lap. The Bible wasn’t as well-worn as it should have been, she’d admit. She read it, but not consistently. She’d been too angry with God during her illness, too convinced that He didn’t see her in her suffering.

The smaller, slender French tome had changed that. She traced a finger over the embossed title of Histoire d’une ?me.

She’d forgotten these lessons, too, in the wake of learning the truth about her mother. She’d forgotten that the pain was supposed to be given a purpose. That she could let the Lord bear it with her, and so grow closer to Him through it. She’d forgotten because it was so much easier to wallow, to grow hard, to shut herself off.

Even now, she could feel the pull toward that dark, quiet place where no one else could enter.

She could go home. Two short miles to the west. Curl up in her own bed, tell the skeleton staff maintaining the place to bar anyone from entrance. Not ever admit what she’d done to Marigold, not face Yates again. Not have to see Alethia’s sincere, sorrowful eyes. When Papa eventually returned, she could tell him she didn’t want to go back to London next Season, that she’d stay at the Abbey. They’d forget about her eventually—society, her family, her friends. Like they’d done before. She could vanish into her misery.

It wasn’t the way she wanted to live. Not the Lavinia she wanted to be. Even if she couldn’t have love and a family of her own, she could still make her life mean something, like St. Thérèse talked about. She could help other people with the Imposters.

That would mean working with Yates. With Marigold. Putting aside this swirling pain. Tamping it down. Pretending, as he’d told her to do, that it had never happened.

She opened the clothbound cover of the autobiography, flipping through the pages in search of the passages she’d underlined before.

...joy is not found in the things which surround us, but lives only in the soul. She closed her eyes and let that sink in. Did that apply to people too? Could her joy not even be found in them? Obviously not. And yet she wasn’t so sure her own soul remembered how to receive joy.

...love lives only by sacrifice and the more we would surrender ourselves to love, the more we must surrender ourselves to suffering . . . Well, that felt right. Had any love she experienced in life not brought suffering? Yet that kind had been thrust upon her. This kind ... Thérèse spoke of a different kind. Sacrificial love. A love Lavinia had never lived out.

It is wrong to pass one’s time in fretting, instead of sleeping on the heart of Jesus. Oh, how peaceful that sounded. It brought fresh tears to her eyes. She flipped again, then paused when a longer passage caught her eye. A passage that she’d underlined too many times, too hard, so that the page had bubbled under the pressure of her pencil tip.

How can a heart given up to human affections be closely united to God? It seems to me that it is impossible. I have seen so many souls, allured by this false light, fly right into it like poor moths, and burn their wings, and then return, wounded, to Our Lord, the Divine fire which burns and does not consume.

She’d made that too-hard mark with shaking hands after she’d found the letters her mother had kept hidden away for decades—letters from a mysterious Hans who spoke of how his daughter reminded him constantly of Lavinia’s mother. She’d thought, when she read them, that this Hans was a lover. Someone with whom Mother had had an affair and had left a child.

Human affections, leading her astray. Planting destruction in her life. Catching her wings on fire.

And they had been—just not the affections Lavinia had assumed. Hans was a brother, not a paramour. It was love of Germany that inspired her above love for her family. Love for her ideals and politics above her husband and daughter. Not the Divine fire, regardless. Not the fire that burned without consuming.

The other fire had consumed her mother. It had burned Lavinia. She still felt its most recent scorching on her heart.

But there was encouragement here too. Because she could always struggle her way back to that waiting heart of Jesus. She could rest there, let Him be her balm.

Her heart didn’t have to be her prison or her betrayer. It could be the thing she offered to her Lord.