Pride and Papercuts (The Austens #5) - Staci Hart Page 0,86

chatting happily despite the sadness behind Georgie’s eyes. They quieted as I approached, Georgie’s face slipping from laughter to worry when she saw me.

I stopped just inside the threshold. My gaze stuck on Laney, drinking in the sight of her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. Of the bloom of color on her cheeks. Of the sharpness of her eyes, their blue otherworldly. Electric. Her lips were pinched at the corners, but it didn’t change the bow, the swell. My own lips knew their shape, longed to taste them again, tingled with forever unfulfilled desire.

Georgie’s eyes bounced from one of us to the other. “You know what? I forgot—I needed to check something out with accounting. Be right back.” And then she walked out, offering an encouraging smile as I passed.

Laney didn’t move. I thought maybe it was because she wanted to stay, but I quickly realized that might have been because I was directly between her and the door.

“Please tell me you’re not going to apologize again,” she warned. “Actually, please don’t say anything. I’m leaving.”

She’d already started walking, reaching me quickly in her hurry. But I couldn’t let her go, not this final time. I caught her by the arm, squeezing gently, appreciating the last taste of her skin against my fingertips.

Heat flared behind her eyes, but not the angry kind, not at first. It was an open look into her heart, a streak of pain and longing I felt in my marrow. It mirrored mine.

“Please,” I said softly. I was left without any other words as I waited for her answer.

When she turned to face me, I let her go.

“I’m leaving,” she blurted, her face tight. “The firm. I’m leaving and going back to the bookstore.”

I was struck still.

“I sent my design resources to Georgie, and Caroline can take over whatever duties I had.”

“Is this because—”

“I’ve been working three jobs, and it’s not sustainable,” she lied. “Between the bookstore and my family’s business, I don’t have time to be here, where I’m not needed. Or wanted.”

You’re wanted. I want you. “What happened with your family?”

I didn’t think her look could darken more, but it did. “Just busy on the front lines of a little corporate warfare. Someone’s sabotaging Longbourne. I thought that was over with Evelyn in jail, but I guess your aunt picked up the torch.”

My brows gathered. “Catherine?”

“No, your other aunt who hates us,” she snapped.

“How do you know it’s her? It could be anyone.” Even as I said it, the possibility niggled at me.

“She practically threatened me when we first met. Would you put it past her?”

My frown deepened.

“Not that it matters. All I know is that I can’t stay here, not with her scheming and not with you. You’ve put me in a prison, and I need to be free of it. Of you.” She said it in such a way that I didn’t know if it was spite or sadness in her voice.

“I understand. I … I won’t stop you. I just wanted to give you this.”

I slipped my hand into my coat, pulling the letter out. Her eyes followed it as I extended it.

She didn’t move to take it. “What’s this?”

“A letter.”

Her eyes took a turn. “What’s in the letter?”

“If I wanted to talk about it, I wouldn’t have written it down.”

“God, you are insufferable.” With a pop, she snatched it from my fingertips, glaring at me. “Goodbye, Mr. Darcy. May we both be so lucky as to never see each other again.”

With an angry rush of air, she was gone.

And so was I.

27

Two Truths and a Lie

LANEY

The world was a blur around me as I left his office, stopping by my desk to blindly stuff my things in my bag, including the letter.

Thoughts fired like a machine gun, too fast to pick one out of the hail. They pinged in my skull, too loud to hear anything else, a cacophony so overwhelming, my body was on autopilot, carrying me out of the building and toward the subway. But I didn’t head for Longbourne like I’d planned. I boarded the train to take me home with a name echoing in whispers in my mind.

Liam.

He invoked a feeling singular to him, a reactionary mixture of frustration and resentment and disdain, combined with longing and rejection and unwanted desire. And I hated myself for it. How could I want a man so uncommonly unworthy? Why did every insult sting deeper than skin—not for the words themselves, but for the disregard of the man