A Kiss For Midwinter (Brothers Sinister #1.5)(10)
She pressed her lips together and looked away. “It wouldn’t be polite to say.”
“The one thing we have never been to one another is polite. But never mind, Miss Charingford, I shall fill in the bad and the good. Either I am an unspeakably rude fellow, the kind who vents his ire and spleen on perfectly innocent young ladies, or…” His gaze slid to her profile. She was still looking across the room, refusing to meet his eyes. “Or,” he said softly, “I am madly in love with you. And I have been for this last year.”
His heart seemed to stop in his chest as he spoke. The seconds that should have ticked by froze into an agony of waiting, watching to see if her eyes would widen. If she would turn to him and see the truth writ large on his features. If she would even care.
But she didn’t look at him. He couldn’t read what he saw in her expression—a tightening of her jaw, a tensing of her hand before she pressed it flat against the table.
“Well,” she finally said, “you’re doing it wrong. You are supposed to pick two possibilities—one dreadful and one lovely.” She turned then, deliberately meeting his eyes. There was a spark of merriment in them. “Confess, Doctor Grantham. That’s two dreadful ones.”
It was such a curious sensation, that constricting feeling that settled about him. He felt as his heart were made of green bottle-glass—cold and wavy, distorting the light that passed through it until even the brightest emotion was stripped of all illumination. He pushed the corners of his lips up into a smile.
“Ah, Miss Charingford. You slay me.”
Maybe some hint of the truth leaked out, because the light faded from her eyes, and she peered up at him. “I didn’t hurt your feelings, did I? I meant it—”
“In all good fun,” he said brusquely. “Yes.”
Fastenings, he could imagine his father saying. I wooed your mother with fastenings. Jonas tried to imagine Miss Charingford’s face if he presented her with a horse-shoe nail retrieved from some mucky boulevard. She would probably look at him…approximately as she looked now, as if he’d offered her a bouquet ripe with horse-droppings.
He’d done it to himself. He had a dreadful sense of humor, a too-blunt tongue, and he’d never seen the point in holding either back. But she’d never take him seriously now. He had told her outright that he loved her, and she hadn’t seen it as anything but another volley, another ill-considered jest. The entirety of his feelings had become a joke. She didn’t even see him as a friend, let alone a suitor.
If he were another person entirely, he might burst into flowery speech. If he did, she’d probably laugh at him. Besides, he didn’t believe in pretending to be anyone other than who he was. Even if she swooned at whatever poetic nonsense he managed to spout, she would only be disappointed once they grew comfortable with each other and he went back to making jokes about death and gonorrhea.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” he said, a little more brusquely than he’d intended. “I’m a doctor. We’re not allowed to have feelings; they interfere with our professional judgment. I’m here to make you a proposition.”
“Oh?” Her jaw squared. “On a scale of boring to improper, where does it fall?”
“Mildly scandalous.” He tapped the table. “I have a wager for you, if you’ve the stomach for it.”
Up went her chin again. “There’s no point to a wager,” she said. “There is nothing you have that I could want.”
He ignored this. “I wager,” he said, “that I could show you a situation before Christmas that would be beyond even your capacity for good cheer.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I see the worst of Leicester. In five minutes, I’ll leave for my next appointment. You smile and you wish and you see an entire world set forth in the most optimistic terms. I wager that I can find you a situation that lacks a bright side.”
He didn’t have fastenings, but he did have his version of it—house calls.
She mulled this over for a few moments. “What do you get if you win?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment, if you please. The more salient question is, what would you wish if you win? You could ask me for any favor. You could make me stand on my head in the market square for twenty minutes, if you wanted. Think, Miss Charingford, of all the ways you might humiliate me. Surely that would be worth something to you.”
She frowned and tapped her fingers against her lips. She didn’t look at him as she thought; she just tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. Finally, she gave a nod. “What if I said I wanted you never to talk to me again?”
His lungs stopped working. “That’s…that’s what you’d want?”
“No sarcastic comments. No biting wit. No reminders of my past mistakes.” Her voice dropped. “Yes, Doctor Grantham. That would tempt me. That would tempt me greatly.”
He swallowed. Every word she spoke hurt. She didn’t just dislike him. She hated him. But if that was the way of things… Best that he discover it now.
“What if you changed your mind later? Would I be barred from speaking?”
She considered this a moment. “I suppose that if I should lose my head so far as to want to hear the grating tones of your voice once more, I should be allowed the opportunity to reverse the wager. It needn’t be a permanent condition.” She tilted her head at him. “It will be, of course.”