offices of my company. Two clerks quit. Poor Felicity had a tomato thrown at her the other day by one of the sisters of your dead prostitutes, Honoria. Can you imagine what that did to the bashful pigeon? She almost came undone.”
Nora closed her eyes, pierced by unrelenting shame. Her sweet sister…how could she bear it?
She’d been a fool to hope. Last night had been nothing but a fantasy, and now her father had torn that fiction asunder with harsh but pertinent realities.
Could he not have waited? One more day. One more night?
Titus shook his head over and over, patently rejecting what she was about to do. “I can help your sisters, Nora. I have powerful allies. We can change the narrative, can influence the press. I’ve seen it done numerous times.”
“We can change the narrative, but we can’t change the truth,” she said, her words sounding droll and dead, even to her. “Not about me.”
Titus’s teeth clacked shut, and he looked as if she’d slapped him.
True to her form, instead of pulling back at the sight of his pain, she forged ahead, ready to rip herself out of his heart once and for all. “It doesn’t change that William killed an Earl. That my sisters are suffering the consequences of my actions because I besmirched myself with other men. And that you will suffer, too.”
He lunged forward, gripping her hands in his. “I’ll survive it, Nora. I’ve survived worse than—”
Her father scoffed. “You can’t know that, Doctor. I’ve seen many a businessman obliterated by reputation—”
“You’ve made your bloody point, Cresthaven. I advise you to not interject into this conversation again.” A finger jabbed in her father’s direction was all it took to press the Baron’s lips together, his mottled skin blanching a little.
Despite her astonishment at her father’s naked fear, Nora persisted. “I refuse to be something you survive, Titus.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I’ve made my decision.” She pulled her hands from his warm grip, already grieving. Mourning. Lamenting his loss. She felt shriveled and bleak, hollowed out by pain. To walk out of here would age her another decade at least.
But she’d do it. For him.
His face hardened. His eyes becoming chips of ore, molten in the flames of his temper. “You. Decided,” he bit out. “Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? You make the decision and I have to abide by it.”
“Yes,” she answered sedately.
“I don’t get a say. I don’t get a choice. You just run away without trusting that I might know better than him. That we might form a solution together.”
“I really am sorry,” she said, her throat threatening to close over the pain. She wished it would, that she could stop her breath right here and sink into oblivion. Sorry didn’t begin to touch the desperate regret threatening to pull her under. “It’s hopeless, Titus. I was always going to damage you one way or the other. And this is bigger than you or me. This is Mercy and Felicity. My parents. Your patients. The families devastated by both my choices and William’s. If there were any other way without damaging those I love…”
He held his hand up to silence her, turning his face to the side as if he couldn’t bear the sight of her. Already his knuckles were swelling, and she wanted nothing more than to kiss them. His perfect, brilliant surgeon’s hands.
Ones that had saved her life twice now.
Perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t, if he’d let fate have its way with her so he wouldn’t feel so tethered.
So she wouldn’t feel this agony.
Perhaps they were always meant to belong to something—someone—else. She to her family’s honor. He to his craft.
“You do what you have to, Nora,” he said, his features cast from granite. “But don’t for one minute think that you’re protecting me. Because I’d have burned this entire place to the ground if it meant having a life with you in it.”
He left in measured strides. Driven away a second time.
“That’s just it,” she whispered. “I’d never ask you to.”
The Evening of
After a week of exhausting himself with punishing amounts of work, Titus had recently discovered drinking as a simpler anesthetic than constant distraction.
After his second brown ale, the tension in his bones loosened, and the aches abated. After two or three subsequent glasses of whiskey—or gin, if he were desperate enough—he could almost convince himself that he didn’t miss her.
Almost.
Her loss had always been an emptiness he couldn’t seem to fill, but this time