Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17

N ever before had a night gone by so slowly. Every remaining moment of the ball had felt like an eternity. In the end, he’d all but kicked out the last stragglers, feeling his sister and Sebastian watching him with every move he made. They had both made it clear they thought something was amiss with him. Neither was the type to stop pushing. Eventually that might cause problems, but he’d convinced them to leave without pressing. And now he was alone, climbing the stairs to his chamber where he knew Esme waited for him.

Waited to resolve what felt like the unresolvable.

He opened the chamber door and moved through the antechamber to his bedroom. Because he had given the order for the servants not to bother with their nightly rituals for his room, the fire had burned low and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. When they did, he caught his breath.

Esme lay tucked up on her side on the bed, her red hair splayed out on his pillows and her hands bunched around her throat. She was fast asleep and didn’t stir, even when he moved closer.

She looked younger in sleep, with all the troubles she’d carried lifted, at least in her dreams. He could almost see her across a room at a ball just like the one he’d just hosted, laughing with her friends, dancing with her father. Dancing with him. Why hadn’t he ever asked her to dance all those years ago? Would things have been different for her if he had?

He shook his head at those wayward thoughts, but they wouldn’t leave his mind. They were stuck there, like a throbbing wound, pulsing with answers to those questions.

If he’d made an effort to get to know Esme back then, he would have found her to be as brave and interesting and wonderful as he found her now. He wouldn’t have been able to resist her, because she was irresistible. And in the ranks of Society where they had belonged, that would have led to only one conclusion.

He would have courted her. He would have fallen in love with her. He knew it because as he looked at her now, tucked into his bed, there was no doubt he had done the same in the weeks they’d been acquainted. He loved her.

That staggered him and he sucked in a sharp breath and steadied himself lightly on the edge of the mattress. Love had never been a positive in his life. Finn had avoided it with intense focus. Truth be told, he’d feared it.

But now he…didn’t. He just felt it, warm and powerful and unyielding. It was part of him, just as she had become a part of him.

And yet she might never let him in. She might never accept what he felt because of what she’d gone through, what she’d lost, what she believed she could never have again. That realization hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced in his thirty years on this earth.

He put a knee into the mattress and reached out to touch her arm. She immediately put up her hands with a gasping burst of breath, on the edge of a fight that broke his already fragile heart. The things this woman had endured.

“Esme,” he said softly. “Esme, it’s me. I’m here. You’re safe.”

She stared at him, almost unknowing for a moment as dreams faded to reality and then she nodded and relaxed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep.”

“I’m glad you did. The party dragged on for a long time,” he said, and leaned his hip on the high edge of the bed.

“Was it successful?” she asked with a yawn, her hand coming out to trace his fingers gently.

He shivered at the touch. “Yes. It was lovely despite my anxiousness for it to end. My sister is very happy.”

She smiled up at him. “And that means you are happy. She’s so lucky to have you, Finn.”

“I’m the lucky one to have her. We went through so much together and lost so much.”

“Your mother, you mean?”

He looked at her. He’d told her a little about the loss of his mother. She had been supportive, but hadn’t pressed. Now he felt compelled to say the rest.

“Yes. It was hard on both of us. She’d longed for my father for years, exuberant with any attention. Brokenhearted with every slight. And there were many slights. At some point it destroyed her. She could talk of nothing else, think of nothing else but him. If we would try to help, she’d scream at us. Poor Marianne got the brunt of that, especially after I came of age and lived in my own home.”

“That’s terrible.”

“One night Marianne showed up, eyes rimmed black from no sleep and begged me to help her. She told me our mother had passed the edge of hysteria at last, despite my sister’s efforts to hold her together, and was in a full collapse. Of course I came at once.”

“You must have been devastated.”

He nodded. “I tried to intervene, tried to convince her to come back to us. But we watched her refuse to eat or drink, watched her wither away for days, weeks. My sister and I asked her to live for us, to live for her children.”

He stopped talking as pain closed his throat. Pain he had been pushing away for years now, trying not to feel that and the helplessness of those horrible days.

“She couldn’t,” Esme said softly, and her gentle voice brought him back to the present.

He drew a shaky breath. “She couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Or both. Instead she died for a man who wouldn’t even come see her when I finally found him holed up with whatever mistress had caught his eye and begged him to do so.”

“He wouldn’t see her?” Esme said, and sat up.

“No. He was a cruel bastard who didn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.” He shook his head. “I’d always known it, but that day was proof. He laughed in my face and sent me away. It was horrible.”

“No wonder you were so drawn to my father. He was the very opposite of such a man.”

He nodded. “Yes. I’d known of Chilton over the years, been friendly with him. But after my mother’s death, he truly became one of my closest friends. One of my dearest confidantes. I cherished every moment with him.”

She touched his face. “I know he felt the same about you. I do recall when your mother died, of course. But how old were you?”

“Twenty-one.” He bent his head. “A man and yet I might as well have been a boy for all the good I did.”

She cupped his cheeks. “You couldn’t have changed the broken heart of a woman who was clearly troubled. Or the cold heart of a cruel man. But you did the next best thing, which was ensure that you didn’t lose Marianne. You two are clearly close, I saw that tonight as I watched from above as you interacted. You’re a good brother.”

He flinched. “Am I? Sometimes I don’t know. I became very protective after Mama’s death. After Marianne’s disastrous coming out afterward. I closed in the walls around her and told myself it was to make sure no harm came to her. But I think now that I did her no favors.”

“Why?” Esme asked.

He shrugged. “I couldn’t see what she truly needed thanks to the blinders of my fear for her well-being. I tried to keep her in a box of my control. When she escaped it, it led her to be a little reckless.” He shook his head. “I found her in a very compromising position with Ramsbury during the country party.”

Esme’s eyes went wide and then she smiled. “Good for Marianne.”

He coughed out a laugh at the unexpected response. “I suppose one could see it that way. It’s all led to her happiness in the end.”

“Then perhaps you needn’t beat yourself up about any further.”

He stared at their hands, their fingers folded together against the sheets. “I could have lost her.”

“But you didn’t. Whatever you tried to do, you accepted their love in the end. You celebrate it. You cannot be expected to be perfect, Phineas.”

He jerked his head up at her use of his full given name. At her suggestion that he didn’t have to be what he’d always been, the only way he knew to earn love. “I still could have been better. With her. With you.”

She let out her breath slowly. “I got upset with you tonight after you found me out, but I realize that it wasn’t fair. This situation is difficult for me. I was lucky enough to have a father who loved me. One I could depend on and when he was ripped out from under me, I had to learn to only take care of myself. I wish I’d had a sibling like you are to Marianne, someone to protect me like you did her.”

He cupped her cheek and she leaned into his palm, her green eyes soft in the low firelight. “I’ll protect you.”

Those same eyes fluttered shut and her mouth set, making his heart sink. “I want to believe that,” she said. “To sink into it like a warm bath. But when this is over…I know I’ll only have me to depend on again. I can’t take the loss, so I must avoid ever feeling it.”

When this was over. She meant the investigation they were conducting into her cousin. But she also meant this thing between them. She was already halfway out his door, back to the life she’d been forced to choose. The life she didn’t believe could ever include him.

It stung like fire. But she had been pushed and forced and harmed for far too long for him to try to prod her now. If he wanted her to trust him, to believe him when he finally confessed that he loved her, he had to continue to earn that trust every moment he was with her.

He drew her in and kissed her gently. He wanted to wash her away on his desire, to connect with her the only way she ever truly let him. Instead, he lay down beside her, pulling her back to his chest and wrapping his arms around her to hold her. She let her breath out in a long, trembling sigh.

“I’m not giving up,” he said, his voice muffled against her hair. God, her hair smelled good. “Tonight Francis was on the edge of drunk and it led him to speak imprudently about your father and you. As enraging as that was to hear, it also encourages me to think that he could be driven to whatever the truth is if I ply him with enough alcohol to bring his guard down entirely. If I make him believe I’m an ally, or at least a potential person he could use for his own advancement.”

She turned her face slightly to look at him over her shoulder and he could see how much those words meant to her. How much she wanted to believe he would live up to them. “Thank you, Finn.”

He nuzzled her neck gently and she shivered. “Will you stay with me?”

She was silent for a moment and then she cuddled back more firmly against his body. “For a while. Just a little while.”