A Lily Among Thorns(120)
“I—would you be very angry if I asked Solomon to take a walk with me instead of going to dinner?” she asked. It was rude, but she didn’t want to wait.
Mrs. Hathaway gave her a beaming smile. “Not at all.”
Chapter 29
The sky was gray, but it was warm and the country lanes were picturesque. The path they were on led to an apple wood half a mile off, and when they wandered off onto the grass it was uneven and soft underfoot. Everything was so different from London. She had forgotten how clear the air was in the country.
“Solomon, I—” Now that the moment was here, she didn’t know how to begin. “I—I want to talk to you.”
“I thought you might.” His face, for once, gave nothing away.
“I don’t—I don’t know how to say it.” Her tongue felt clumsy in her mouth.
“You never do,” he said with a touch of bitterness.
“Don’t be an ass,” she said. “I’m trying.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Don’t patronize me. I know I don’t. But I am, because I want to.”
“You look like you’d rather have your teeth pulled with red-hot pincers,” he said. “When I tell you I love you, you look at me as if I’m holding your head underwater. I can’t—I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to be like Daubenay. I don’t want to make demands and beg until you hate me.” But he waited, listening. He’d always believed she could do this, if she wanted to.
A few drops of summer rain splashed onto her hand and she shook them off. “I could never hate you,” she got out. And yes, she would rather have her teeth pulled with red-hot pincers, but pulling out her teeth would never bring that wild, wary hope into Solomon’s eyes.
And surely nothing, not even this, could be more terrifying than losing him. Serena was tired of putting a brave face on things. She plunged forward.
“I’m no good at hating people, can’t you see that? I try and I try and—oh, Lord Smollett is easy, I hate him right enough, but just look what happened with René. I thought he’d turned on me, I thought he didn’t care what became of me, and I still couldn’t hate him. I gossiped with him, I laughed at his jokes, I persuaded Elijah not to turn him in to the Foreign Office, and it wasn’t because of those marriage lines. It was because the thought of him with a noose around his neck and a knife in his gut made me ill. And what I feel for you—it’s so much more.” It was raining a little harder now, but Serena didn’t move, didn’t even raise a hand to shield her face. Neither did Solomon.
“It’s easy for you to say ‘I love you.’ Plenty of people have loved you and stood by you and told you you were worth the trouble. I—it isn’t easy for me. I don’t know how to say it, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t even know if this is love. It’s deeper than I thought it would be—if I tried to uproot it, it would pull my heart out of my chest. I need you so desperately. I need you to make demands, I need you to hurt me. I need you to love me, and you could stop. You could decide I’m not what you wanted after all, that I’m not worth the trouble, and I won’t be able to stop feeling this way, I won’t be able to hate you, I won’t be able to live—”
Tears stood in her eyes and Solomon, Solomon was looking at her like she was the Holy Grail, like she was the sacred thing he’d been seeking all his life.
“Oh, God, Serena, I—” he began incoherently. Then he stopped himself, smiling shakily. “I’ll try to save the transports and the fevered kisses for a few minutes from now, shall I?”
She stared at her interlocked hands. They were white at the knuckles. A drop of water fell from her hair into her eyes. “I would appreciate that.”
“You’ve never made any particular effort to be pleasant to me, have you?”
She shook her head.
“You’ve been quite a lot of trouble, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” she said in a low voice.
“I think you’re worth it. And I always will.”
“Why?”
“There isn’t—there isn’t a reason. I just love you.” She opened her mouth to protest and he said, “All of you. Even the wretched parts. Even your nasty streak and your boring gray gowns.”
She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what more she needed to hear.