After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(99)
They had reached their train. He found their car and then handed her up. The car was relatively empty; Adrian took off his hat and coat and sat on the other side of the seat from her.
“I’m sorry to sound as if I’m complaining,” Camilla said. “I really am delighted to get to know my family again, and they’ve been nothing but welcoming. I don’t regret a minute. But it is bewildering to find yourself in the midst of five-year-old arguments that you don’t completely understand.”
“I can imagine.”
Camilla looked down at the floor. “Within the first three days, Judith was saying things like, Theresa, if you don’t learn to do such-and-such, Camilla will never be able to marry well. Which was extremely awkward. You see, I do not think I will ever have a chance to marry better than I did the last time, and the one thing I specifically asked Judith for was the chance to be unmarried from him.”
His heart clenched at that. He had been looking for an opportunity to bring up what they’d been to each other, and here it was. Adrian leaned forward. He thought of what he had in his pocket. All he had to do was— The door to the car opened, and a man in a brown suit set an attaché case onto the luggage rack. He removed a newspaper, put on a pair of spectacles, sat down, and began reading.
Oh. Damn. Adrian tried not to feel impatient. There would be time, after all.
He pulled back, shifting subtly in place. “Go on, then. How did it all turn out?”
“It took three days for Benedict and Theresa to pull me into their pact.”
“Your younger brother and sister, right? What pact?”
“Ah, don’t you know? Everyone tries to use us against each other: ‘If you don’t behave like a marionette with no free will, your sister will lose her chance to also behave like a marionette with no free will. Do you want to be the one who does that to her?’”
Adrian laughed outright. The man with the newspaper looked up, sniffed, and pointedly went back to reading.
“So the three of us are now all in agreement. None of us wish to behave like marionettes, and thus, we cannot be used as weapons against each other.”
“That seems fair.”
“And that, in turn, hurts Judith’s feelings again. She loves her husband, but…” Camilla swallowed. “Would you believe she set up a trust in my name? She owns a business making clockwork, and she tries not to be difficult, but… I suspect that Judith just wants us all to have the chance to marry marquesses the way she did, and I don’t know how to tell her that she can keep her marquess. I don’t want one.”
The train started moving, and with it, the hiss of the steam engines and the screech of the gears filled the car. It provided a little cover for their conversation.
“No?” He leaned forward an inch. “Who do you want?”
Her cheeks pinked a little, but she looked out the window. “I have no intention of becoming an object of curiosity in polite society. They’d let me go to a few of their balls and they would gawk at me and ask me if I had really been married and if the marriage had really been annulled and what I had been doing beforehand.” Camilla shrugged. “They would want me to feel ashamed of where I have been, and I have had a lifetime’s worth of shame. I don’t want to marry a man who will forgive me for what I have done. I want someone who will treasure me for it. You know what I want.”
“You want to be chosen,” he said in a low voice. “You want someone who thinks of all the women in the world and decides that he wants you above any other. You want a long, slow falling in love.”
Her eyes fluttered up to his. Her cheeks were rosy, and the way she looked at him made him want to take her in his arms, and damn the other passenger.
“A point of clarification,” Adrian asked. “Precisely how long a falling in love were you hoping for? My parents took three years. As for me, that sounds rather excessive.”
She colored further. “I should like to reach our destination, at a minimum. Any time before then would be too fast.”
“I see.”
“Longer than that, I suppose, is up for debate.” She grinned at him. “But I’ve spent this entire time talking of myself. Tell me about you. What did your brother think? Have you started producing the plates for the exhibition? When is the exhibition, and would you mind horribly if I came?”
God, he had missed talking to her. He had missed hearing her voice; he had missed seeing the glow in her eyes as she drank in his every word. He’d missed the way she laughed and the way she looked at him and the way she reached out at one point and tried to remove a piece of fluff from his lapel, and the way his whole body responded to that touch of her finger on fabric.
He had missed everything about her.
“I didn’t ask before. Why Somerset?”
She looked down. “Well, since we couldn’t talk to one another before the annulment, I decided to put my time while I was waiting to good use. You know how I felt about looking back.”
He nodded.
“I’ve been looking back,” she confessed. “I went to visit Mrs. Marsdell—the woman who taught me to crochet. She was dead. I left flowers on her grave. I visited my uncle; he apologized, believe it or not, and I had the pleasure of seeing him very embarrassed. He had no idea what was going to happen, but that is no excuse for what he did. I visited his cousin, who was terrible. I went up to see Kitty; she’s settling quite well into her new position, and she’s so happy to have her daughter with her that I cried for her. I thought it would…help, perhaps? If I saw everyone who had once mattered to me.”