After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(75)

“Camilla.” His hand pressed against hers, warm and comforting. Her heart was beating fast and impossibly loud in her ears. “It was not your fault. It was never your fault. It was always theirs.”

She bowed her head.

“And we’ve won,” he told her. “Look at this. They thought they could make you into nobody, and they couldn’t. We’re going to bring them to justice—you and I together.”

She inhaled. She didn’t know what to think, what to say. Look forward, she thought, don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back.

If she looked back and they didn’t want her, it would hurt too much. Even for her.

It was too much to comprehend.

“Not me.” She shut her eyes and turned her palm over so that their fingertips could glide against each other. His breath hissed out. “Us,” she told him. “It has always been us.” She was saying too much; she wasn’t saying enough. “From the moment when you stopped me in the road and told me Miles and Lassiter were our enemies,” she confessed. “From the moment I chose to believe you without proof.”

He leaned into her. “Camilla,” he whispered.

She held her breath, hoping. The heat of his body warmed hers. His arm, not quite around her waist, braced her in place. His breath whispered against her ear. But Kitty sat half a room away, and hope was all they could do.

She tilted her head and looked up at him.

He smiled at her. Oh, God, that smile. She could feel it break across her like sunlight. She had never felt so precious, so wanted.

His hand twitched at his side, but it did not come up to brush her cheek. She felt it only in her imagination—the brush of his hand, like the caress of his gaze, stroking her.

All the want she couldn’t let herself feel rose up in her. All this time, she’d hoped and hoped and hoped.

Maybe it wasn’t all the hope that had been the problem. Maybe it was that she had not let herself hope enough.

Adrian’s smile felt almost sad.

“I could not have been more lucky in my choice of women to not be married to,” he said.

And maybe she could hope for more with him, too.

Her heart wasn’t breaking. It was too full to break. She wanted him, and he wanted a choice, and she wanted to be chosen. It hurt, the best kind of pain, this holding back. But this prickle of hope, of sheer desire… It was nothing to the sea of loneliness and want she’d swum in for too long. To know that she might be loved, that she might be respected? To know that her family might want her?

It was more than she’d had in years, and still, now that she gave free rein to her hope, she hoped for more.

She had not come this far, holding onto all this hope for this long, just to give it up. She wanted him, too. She wanted him to choose her, freely. She wanted it all, and her entire being ached with the wanting.

And so she just nodded.

“It’s the same for me,” she whispered. “Not being lawfully wed to you has been a singular honor.”





Chapter Twenty





Weeks ago, standing in the road with the bad taste of the marriage still in his mouth, Adrian would have been delighted to know that this moment would come—that he would be sitting on a train with the woman he had been forcibly wed to, his satchel packed with affidavits and accounts. They were ready to annul the legal flimflammery that bound them together.

The problem was that it was only the legal flimflammery that bound them together. When they were finished… What then?

Camilla sat looking out the window. She’d taken off her gloves, but held them still. She did not seem to notice that she was turning them around over and over again, as if she could direct all her nerves into the cloth.

“Have you thought of trying to find your family afterward?” he finally asked. “I know you haven’t wanted to speak of them. But they’re still there.”

“I don’t know.” She blinked, looking at her gloves, then set them aside. “Nothing’s changed. Judith didn’t write to me. And maybe she’s changed her mind—I suppose there’s no reason to imagine she’s tracked my whereabouts all these years—but if I go to her and she throws me out…” Camilla trailed off, shaking her head.

“Would you like me to accompany you to visit them?”

She turned to look at him for a long moment. A faint flush spread across her cheeks.

He wondered what she was thinking. Then he wondered what he was thinking. Her sister was a marchioness. The woman he was thinking of as simply ‘Camilla’ was the daughter of an earl. And yes; his mother had been the daughter of a duke.

That only meant that he knew the set. He knew his own uncle, refusing to acknowledge his nephews, not even speaking his own sister’s name in polite company, no matter how he professed his love in private.

He’d met Camilla after she’d been out of that milieu for years.

They’d been in his domain these last weeks. He hadn’t forgotten the reality of the matter; he never let himself forget reality. But he was used to the notion of Camilla not having a family.

“Never mind.” He looked away. “I only just now realized how that would look.”

“I was just trying to imagine how I would introduce you,” she told him. “‘Judith, this is Mr. Adrian Hunter; we used to be married.’”