Pride and Papercuts (The Austens #5) - Staci Hart Page 0,71

too difficult to concentrate under the weight of that many feelings.

I didn’t know how I could feel so much at once. How I could want to rip Liam limb from limb and simultaneously wonder what it would feel like to fall into his arms. He’d gotten so close, so unbearably close when we were arguing that he could have kissed me with little more than a shift. And beyond reason, I would have let him. I’d left the office so angry and hurt and shaken, and based on Catherine’s rant, it seemed safe to assume that Georgie and Jett would never be.

Once at Wasted Words, I didn’t tell Jett what I suspected, keeping it strictly to what Catherine had said. But he made his own deductions, sinking into the booth across from me and dropping his head to his hands.

All of that was hard, but when Georgie came in, the heartache was unendurable. There wasn’t anywhere they could truly be alone, but they stepped into the back. I should have looked away, but it hurt so acutely, I couldn’t. Not as she cried, not when he held her face and kissed her with longing so palpable, I felt it from across the room. They held each other for a long moment before letting go.

Georgie hurried out, her face bent with emotion.

Jett stood behind her, watching her walk away.

And I was struck by the unfairness of it all. Jett didn’t come back out for a little while, keeping himself busy in back where he could be alone. I shed tears of my own at the utter unjustness, the complete dejection, the sheer indignation of the circumstance. I wanted to hate Darcy for it, knowing he’d played some part, but in the end, it wasn’t him who’d thrown the hammer. It was Catherine.

And because of my family.

Jett told me the whole of it when we left work. The truth of their circumstance was what he’d suspected and feared—she wanted to be with him, but she would have to walk away from her job, her legacy, and her family. And she would do it, she’d insisted.

But Jett wouldn’t let her. So they said goodbye instead.

That was the truth of love—he cared so much for her that he couldn’t bear her sacrifice.

The gesture made the whole thing that much worse.

The last place Jett and I wanted to go was to Mom’s tonight, but dinner had been planned, and there were whispers of an announcement from Kash and Lila. No one had said what—especially to Mom—and though the Bennets were shit at keeping secrets, none of us had to. Somebody was collecting prize money for the next one of the newfangled Bennet women to get pregnant. Maisie and Marcus were first, and Tess would plan her pregnancy down to the hour. So it had to be Lila. Mom was bound to have an emotional equivalent of an aneurysm. And everyone would be over the moon.

Everyone except Jett, and by proxy, me.

Jett barely spoke on the train, only marginally more on the walk from the station. And none at all when we walked into the bustling house full of happy voices. We greeted our family. Took our places at the table. Listened to them talk around us.

But I couldn’t pack my resentment away. I couldn’t listen to Mom go on about nothing, could barely even hear her voice without a fresh wave of irritation with every syllable she uttered. It wasn’t her fault. None of it was her fault. Mom couldn’t manage to take down Christmas decorations, never mind the multimillion-dollar corporation Evelyn Bower had run before her arrest. Evelyn and her horrid friends had always been unnecessarily cruel to Mom—the spiteful, old crows—and when Bower Bouquets tried to sue Longbourne, none of us were surprised. But to know our family’s involvement with Evelyn Bower’s downfall had stopped Jett from having Georgie was just too much to bear.

“And how is your friend?” Mom said knowingly in Jett’s direction, bringing me back to the moment. “The Darcy girl?”

Jett stiffened. “I won’t be seeing much of her anymore. It’s no big deal,” he lied.

“Why not?” Mom asked, pouting a little and blatantly disregarding his obvious hint that he didn’t want to talk about it.

So I answered for him. “Because Catherine de Bourgh hates us and told Georgie to choose between us or her family.”

Jett cut me a look. The table went still.

Mom gaped like a trout, her brows together in confusion. “Whatever does Cat have to do with