Thomas looked at her again. She gave a small, precise nod that told him nothing about what she actually felt, and he found he respected her enormously for the composure of it.
He thought about what this morning had done to the Penrose family. He thought about what Clarissa's flight would mean for their standing, for their name, for the quiet respectability that was the only currency they had. He thought about Genevieve specifically, young, blameless, entirely uninvolved in any of this, and what it would mean for her marriage prospects to be the sister of a woman who had fled her wedding to a Harrington.
He thought about the Harrington estate.
He thought about Clarissa, which he immediately stopped doing because it created a deep ache in his chest that he did not know how to resolve. He looked at Genevieve once more.
She was still watching him with those steady green eyes, not pleading, not performing, simply waiting, as though she had already accepted whatever he decided and was merely present for the announcement. Something about that quiet patience settled something in him he had not expected to find settled today.
"I will agree," he said at last. "On one condition."
Mr. Penrose straightened.
"Name it,” the older man replied. Thomas glanced over at Genevieve, who was watching him, like a small animal watching something that it could not decipher if it was a friend or a predator. He knew her life was in his hands.
"I would like to speak with Miss Genevieve," Thomas said. "Alone. Before any agreement is final… If she will permit it."
Genevieve looked at him steadily for a moment. She glanced at her parents, silently asking for reassurance. A soft blink from her father was the only small, quiet signal that she received. She turned back to him.
“Of course,” she nodded.
“The drawing room should be empty,” Mrs. Penrose said.
“We shall go there then,” Thomas said, standing up. He gently held out his arm for Genevieve. Gingerly, she wrapped her arm around his, the warmth seeping into his skin.
He needed to hear it from her if she was truly willing. His heart could not take another mistake.
Chapter 3
The drawing room felt considerably larger with only two people in it.
Genevieve had been in this room a thousand times. Had grown up beneath its pale green walls, had taken tea there with neighbors and acquaintances and her mother's friends, had sat at the writing desk in the far corner doing correspondence while rain streaked the windows. And yet it seemed to her now that she had never properly noticed its dimensions before.
Or perhaps it was simply that every other time she had been in it, the room had been filled in the ordinary way, with noise and movement and the comfortable clutter of daily life, and she never had cause to feel how far away the far wall was, or how the morning light fell in long rectangles across the carpet, or how entirely still a room could become when two people were both trying very hard not to be the first to say something wrong.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap, which she was aware was precisely the sort of thing a person did when they were trying very hard to appear composed, and which therefore probably communicated the opposite. She could feel the slight pressure of her own fingers against the back of her hand.
Outside, distantly, a cart was making its way along the lane. The familiar creak and rumble of it struck her as almost offensive, the world simply continuing on in that ordinary way when everything had tilted sideways in the last hour.
Across from her, Thomas Harrington sat with the careful stillness of a man who had decided, somewhere between the study and here, that he was going to hold himself together through sheer force of will and the particular stubbornness of the well-bred.
His hands rested on his knees. His blue eyeswerenot looking at her; he was looking at some middle distance between them, though she had the sense that he was not really seeing it. His jaw was set in a way that told her nothing whatsoever about what was happening behind it.It was hard for her not to look at the man she admired so greatly.
She was acutely aware of the doors standing open. Her mother had seen to that personally, with the particular precision of a woman closing stable doors significantly after the horse had bolted, but Genevieve was glad of it regardless. The open doors felt like proof of something, though she could not quite have said what.
The silence stretched.
A bee found its way in through the window; she could hear its low, drowsy hum somewhere near the curtains, and then it found its way out again. She watched a mote of dust turn slowly in the light.
"I must apologize," she said, because the silence had stretched to the point where something had to fill it, and she could not think of anything else, and she was beginning to feel the particular torture of two people sitting in the same room and both of them thinking things they were not saying. "For my sister. For all of this. You came here this morning expecting an entirely different day and instead—"
"Please." His voice was quiet but definite. It cut through the space between them more cleanly than she had anticipated. "Do not apologize for something that was not your doing."
"Nevertheless—"
"Miss Genevieve." He looked at her then, directly, and she felt the full weight of his attention in a way she had not anticipated. It was not unkind. It was simply fixed upon her with great intent.
The kind of focus that made her suddenly, unaccountably conscious of the warmth in her cheeks, and the way she was sitting, and the small, loose curl that had escaped near her left ear sometime in the last hour, and which she had not had the opportunity to correct. "I mean it. You have nothing to answer for."