After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(56)

“I…” He shook his head and leaned forward and set his hand atop hers. “Camilla, I know how hard this has been for you. At this point, you have seen where I come from, what I have. I have several homes, horses, and ready funds. You have nothing. All you would have to do was lie, once, to the examiners, you realize, and there would be no annulment. I would be legally obligated to supply your needs for the rest of your life.”

“Please don’t point it out.” Camilla didn’t want to be tempted.

“And I know what you want. You want permanence. A place to stay.”

She couldn’t meet his eyes. “Someone to care about me, just a little.”

“And yet here you are, helping me win an annulment that leaves you worse off.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I can’t help but know it.”

“Why, then?”

Because she didn’t want to hurt him. Because she made bad choices. Because… “You told me the other day, that someday someone would love me for who I was?” The room felt large around her. Or maybe she felt unbearably small. “I shouldn’t believe it. There is no evidence it can be true. If it could happen, would it not have done so, once?”

“Camilla.”

“I should not believe it, but I do. I have no reason for hope, so I hope beyond reason. I keep hoping, that someday, someone will care. I believe that I deserve it, even though I know I cannot. I have known for years that it cannot be, and yet I refuse to stop hoping. You are the only person in the world who has ever told me that I should keep on hoping. I’m not going to repay that kindness with cruelty.”

He was watching her so intently, some fierce emotion in his eyes that she couldn’t quite interpret.

Now that she’d given voice to that hope, it rose within her, strong and indomitable. She was going to be loved, damn it. Someday. She was going to.

It wouldn’t be him. She knew that, the way she knew that she wished it would be.

“You can’t steal love,” she told him. “You can only earn it. And I want to be the kind of person who can still believe, after all this time, that I will deserve it.”

“That’s it.” He stood straight up and closed his notebook of sketches. “That’s what I’ve been missing—the last three plates, of course—we’ve been trying to tell the wrong story.”

“Your pardon? Adrian—we should talk about whether we use this—”

He almost ran to the door. “Sorry—I have to fix this now. It’s—ah, sorry!”

He was putting on a coat and hat, and Camilla was utterly bewildered.

“I’ll tell you when it’s done.” The smile he gave her was painful and brilliant and so warm that it felt like it could burn her. “I’m sorry,” he apologized one last time. “I have to go.”



* * *



Adrian barely saw her for days once he understood what to do with the plates. It didn’t matter.

He gradually came to realize that he had a problem over the course of those days.

He spent most of his time at Harvil Industries, working with his artists. Refining, looking for everything that was wrong, shaping the china designs again and again until the story meant more and more to each of them.

He came home for late repasts.

Camilla was always there. She’d tell him about something new she’d read in the ecclesiastical reports or another idea for when he had time again. They would talk, and he would like it, and he didn’t have time to think about how much he was liking it. He really didn’t.

He’d go to sleep and he’d think about china designs—about tigers chasing dreams, and…

And the plates weren’t about her. Really, they weren’t. Every one of the artists involved had a different opinion of what they meant. Mrs. Song didn’t precisely cry when they decided on that first plate, a tiger cub chasing that stylized dream over a waterfall into new and strange terrain, but it was close. Adrian felt a strange compression in his chest when they planned out the last one.

The plates weren’t about Camilla. They were about everyone.

Yet somehow, Adrian had started thinking of her as part of that everyone.

That yearning just got worse with every passing day.

Adrian had a problem, he realized after he’d been working on the design for so long his head was spinning with lack of sleep.

Truth be told, he’d had one for a while, but he admitted it to himself for the first time on a long night, while they were on the verge of finishing their designs.

He realized it at night, in bed, when he was alone.

It wasn’t cold, and he wasn’t lonely. Not in any traditional sense of the word. He wasn’t one of those sordid creatures who claimed that it was impossible to go for any length of time without having intercourse: any man who claimed such a need was hardly a man.

Adrian had nobody to blame for his problem but himself, and he should have seen it coming.

His problem was this: Adrian liked Camilla.

He more than liked her; he’d noticed that first dizzying swirl of sexual interest the first day they’d met. She was pretty and so easy to talk to. She listened to him and had her own thoughts. She’d adjusted to the whirlwind that they’d embarked on with a grace that few would have managed.