As the Devil Dares (Capturing the Carlisles #3)(87)

“She cried when they met,” Whitby reminded her.

“Oh that’s right, I remember now. Well, he’s not made you cry since.”

“Usually he just makes her furious—”

“The way you two are doing to me now?” Mariah interrupted, letting the frustration and irritation replace the sorrow inside her.

Immediately, she regretted her outburst. Her friends were only trying to help, not realizing they were making her feel worse. Oh, she knew how to deal with anger, but she didn’t know how to deal with love. Especially when that love had been nothing more on Robert’s part than calculated manipulation.

She admitted, “Yes, we had an argument. But it was nothing.” Only the shattering of her heart.

“She slapped him,” Whitby added solemnly for Mrs. Smith’s benefit.

The housekeeper glanced curiously at her. “That sounds like more than a simple row to me.”

“Yes, it was, all right?” Her eyes stung, and she blinked hard as her vision began to blur again. “We had a terrible fight, and I slapped him.”

Mrs. Smith reached to gently pat her hand. “Whatever for, my dear?”

“Because she loves him,” Whitby explained.

Mariah stared at her two best friends with mortification swelling inside her as they looked at her with expressions of confusion and pity. Her lips parted as she readied to dissemble, to hide the truth from them—

“Yes,” she whispered instead, so softly the sound was almost lost beneath the rumble of the carriage wheels. She lowered her gaze to her hands, which were folded uselessly in her lap, and she sat stiff and unmoving despite the bouncing of the carriage. There was no point in denying what was so obviously visible on her face. “I do love him—did love him…but it doesn’t matter now how I feel.”

“Oh, sweeting.” Mrs. Smith slipped her arm around her shoulders in a motherly embrace. “I’m certain the man cares about you. You two can work past whatever little problems are between you.”

Little problems? The destruction of an entire neighborhood lay between them. She laughed at that bitter irony, but the sound emerged as a soft sob. “No. We have no future.” She swiped her hand at her eyes as she admitted, “I was nothing to him but an obstacle between him and the partnership. I got caught up in his charms and forgot that.”

Across from her, Whitby said nothing, but his face fell, right before all his features blurred beneath the hot tears welling in her eyes. And thank goodness, because she didn’t think she could stand another look of pity from either of them.

“I was a fool,” she breathed out, finally giving voice to her most tortured emotions. “He called me beautiful, said I was special, and I thought…I thought…Oh, it doesn’t matter!”

“Did he make promises to you?” Mrs. Smith pressed gently.

Mariah’s heart would have broken at the older woman’s innocent questions if it hadn’t already shattered. Even now Mrs. Smith thought the best of her, and it never occurred to the woman that Mariah might have lost more to Robert than her pride and dreams of the future.

Wordlessly, she shook her head as new humiliation heated through her.

“When we return, I’ll call him out,” Whitby assured her, making her tear-blurred eyes grow wide. “Pistols at dawn.” Even as he made the promise, though, his face paled with the realization of what he was saying. “I think.”

“Oh, Whitby!” She smiled through her tears and reached across the compartment to hug him. “Thank you!”

He tensed. “You mean—you mean you really want me to duel for you?” Panic cracked his voice as he added, “With Carlisle?”

“No, you silly goose! You are not dueling with him.” She didn’t know which was more amusing—the image in her mind of Whitby attempting to duel or the panicked expression on his face. “I meant for being such a good friend.”

“Oh. That.” He leaned back against the squabs with visible relief, the color returning to his face. “Well. It’s a good thing that you won’t let me duel with him. Because I’d have put a ball in him. I’m quite a good shot, you know.”

“La!” Mrs. Smith arched a dubious brow as she picked up her knitting again. “Not better than Robert Carlisle.”

“I most certainly am.”

“Mr. Whitby, do you even know how to fire a pistol?”

“Of course I do! I won the spring marksmanship in Buxton last year, I’ll have you know.”

“Out of how many shooters?”

“That’s not important…”

As her two dearest friends argued about Whitby’s prowess with firearms—or lack of it—Mariah leaned against the side of the carriage and stared out once more at the passing city, but she didn’t see any of it. She was too worried about Evelyn and too hurt by Robert to pay it any attention.

Only sheer resolve kept back a new round of tears. The three of them would find Evelyn and stop her from marrying Williams, which was all that mattered now. She couldn’t go back in time and stop herself from falling in love with Robert, but she could stop her sister. And she would never let Evelyn make the same mistake she had.

Never.

*



Robert hunched his shoulders against the cold as he made his way through Mayfair, but the bitter self-recrimination that swept through him burned hot.