Pride and Papercuts (The Austens #5) - Staci Hart Page 0,90
each other.”
“Revenge. He hates me too.”
A dry laugh shot out of me. “You’re just as conceited as he is. Maybe he just told me because it was the right thing to do? By the way, how was Atlantic City? I hear it’s nice this time of year.”
The light Wyatt pretended slid into darkness like a thunderhead blotting out the sun. “I can’t believe you’d trust him over me. After everything he’s done to you.”
“Darcy might be a lot of things, but he’s not a liar. You, on the other hand, I don’t know at all. Please, don’t deny it. I don’t want to have to ask Georgie, not after all she’s been through. I guess I just want to know why. Why did you choose me? Were you trying to get to Georgie again, or do you just get off on torturing people? Or maybe Liam was right. Maybe you just want to piss him off.”
“It isn’t very hard, is it?”
“No. But you seem to take a particular sort of pleasure in it.”
“He ruined my life.”
“He ruined your plans.”
“I loved her,” he insisted through his teeth.
“Just not enough to be honest with her. To convince her you were trustworthy so she’d leave her fortune open to the vacuum of your debt.”
“You think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”
Another laugh, this one thick with shame. “If I have learned one thing, it’s that I don’t have anything figured out. Here I thought you were the good guy and Liam was the devil, but I had it backward. I punished him and defended you. Liam was right—I am a fool.” I stared at Wyatt through a couple of heartbeats. “If you’re not going to tell me why you went after me, I have work to do.”
He watched me, his lips a thin line and his eyes ice. “It’s all over anyway—Georgie is in love with your brother. There’s no use separating her from Darcy anymore, no point in needling him to act out to show her what a controlling megalomaniac he is so I could get her back.”
My lips pursed as I inhaled hard through my nose and exhaled loudly. “And I was your in.”
A shrug. “Gotta work with what I’m given.”
I stood, my hands shaky as I picked up my bag. “Can’t say it’s been fun. Do me a favor and never show your fucking face here again. Because when my brother finds out what you did to Georgie, he’s not going to use words to express his feelings.”
I’d been doing a lot of storming lately, and I did it again, heading for the door with my pulse racing. I didn’t know where I was going, though I turned for Longbourne. I could walk the bazillion blocks or just walk until I calmed down enough to take the subway the rest of the way. Either way, I had energy to burn. So I took off down Broadway, chugging like a freight train.
The sea of red lasted half a dozen blocks before it even thought about dissipating. Slowly, the color leached out, and the dull sadness of rejection and the confirmation of my mistake shaded everything blue.
Darcy was right. I’d known it enough to confront Wyatt, but the verification straight from the source was a bucket of ice water down my back. I hadn’t known I’d been holding out hope that Darcy was wrong until then. And now there was nothing to do but figure out how to accept everything that had happened since I met Darcy and my life was flipped over and dumped out.
I was wrong, and I needed to tell him so. Not for him, but for me. Because until I did, I wouldn’t be able to move on. Until I admitted my mistake, it would haunt me.
And then I could walk away from him forever.
The objective renewed me, and I trotted down the steps of the next station I came to, heading for him.
I had so many contradictory feelings, they tangled up in a knot, indiscernible as anything but one massive ache in my chest. I carried the feeling with me when I stood and exited the train. It was with me when I spanned the blocks to his offices. In the elevator, it constricted, shrinking until the ache was a slice of pain on my heart.
A few sets of eyes followed me through the office as I made my way to Darcy’s door. A knock, my breath locked in my lungs. A stretch of silence.