“No,” Anthony said. “You didn’t. But you should have asked her what she wanted. You should have listened when she told you she did not want to marry him.”
Lewis said nothing. He looked at his sister, and something in his expression shifted. Something that looked like shame.
Anthony pushed himself to stand. The room tilted slightly, and he gripped the bedpost until it steadied. His side burned, but he ignored it. He had borne worse, after all. The pain in his heart right at this moment was infinitely much worse than any physical injury.
“I’ll go,” he said again.
He moved toward the door. Lewis did not stop him. Caroline did not speak, but he could not resist as he passed her. “Caroline,” he said quietly.
He heard her breath catch.
“I will be at Wynford House tonight,” he said. “If you come, I will be there. If you don’t—” He stopped. “If you don’t, I will understand. And I will not bother you again.”
He left before she could answer, before Lewis could say anything…before he lost the nerve to walk out of that room without looking back.
The carriage ride back to Wynford House was a blur of pain and calculation. Anthony sat with his hand pressed to his side, feeling the bandages shift beneath his waistcoat, and tried not to think about the expression on Caroline’s face when he had left.
She had not said anything. She had not stopped him. She had stood there in silence while he walked away, and he did not know what that meant.
He had ended their arrangement. He had sent her away. He had told her it was over, and she had left with her face wet with tears, and now he had the audacity to ask her to come to him.
She would not come. Why would she?
He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. The knife wound throbbed in time with his pulse, a dull, persistent reminder of how close he had come to losing everything.
If she did not come, he would accept it. He would let her go. He would watch her marry someone else—someone safe, someone respectable, someone who had not dragged her through London’s underbelly in stolen breeches and called it adventure.
But God, he hoped she would come.
The carriage pulled up to Wynford House, and Anthony climbed out slowly, every movement a negotiation with the stitches in his side. His butler met him at the door with barely concealed alarm.
“Your Grace. Should I send for the doctor?”
“No.” Anthony moved past him into the entrance hall. “If Lady Caroline arrives tonight, send her to the study immediately. No matter the hour.”
The butler’s expression did not change. “Of course, Your Grace.”
Anthony climbed the stairs to his study and poured himself a brandy he did not drink. He sat in the chair by the fire and watched the flames and waited.
She would not come…but he would wait anyway.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“You told me to come.”
After sneaking out of her house once more, Caroline stood in the doorway of Anthony’s study, still in her cloak, her hands clenched at her sides.
She had climbed out of the carriage three minutes ago, had stood on the pavement in front of Wynford House, telling herself she could still turn back, could still choose dignity over whatever this was. And then she had walked up the steps anyway because the alternative—never knowing—was worse than any humiliation he could deliver.
He was at the window, his back to her, one hand pressed to his injured side. The lamplight threw his shadow long across the floor, and for a moment she simply looked at him, this man who had turned her entire world sideways.
He turned slowly. The lamplight caught his face, and she saw the exhaustion there, the shadows beneath his eyes, and the tight set of his jaw. He looked like a man who had not slept in days. He looked like a man who had been waiting. The careful composure he usually wore was gone, stripped away, and what remained was raw.
“I didn’t think you would,” he said quietly.
“I shouldn’t have.” Her voice was sharp, edged with the anger she had been carrying since he walked out of that guest room.
The anger she had nursed through every minute of the carriage ride here, through every second of doubt and longing and fury that had tangled itself into something she could not untangle.