through so much?
“You have to let it all go,” Daemon said. “You have to forget about the past and think to the future. Yours and hers.”
“We have no future together.”
“I never said together. You and Sophie are already entwined through Matthew, Violet and their child. You will always have to suffer her presence as long as you and Matthew are friends. She needs to be in contact with her family.”
What had he done? Once again he’d let his out-of-control emotions rule the day rather than stepping back from the carnage-to-be to consider the angles. “Could I be more selfish or thoughtless?”
His brother, the mind reader, said, “No, but you could start by apologizing and telling her what she means to you.”
“I don’t know what she means to me.”
“Well, I know how much you mean to her. For that woman to have shared your bed means she cares a great deal.”
“How long has it been since she shared your bed?” Why had he asked that? He didn’t want to know, but he had to. He had to know if he could live with the knowledge that she liked Daemon more. Especially since he hadn’t called her an ambitious slut. This question had nothing to do with titles at all.
“Months. Several months. We are more friends than anything else.”
“I don’t really think she would have me after everything that has happened.”
“True, she turned me down,” Daemon helpfully pointed out.
“I think she would still turn you down if you were to suddenly inherit the kingdom and become a prince,” Matthew said.
“I will have to convince her.”
“How?” both men asked.
“I will have to show her how much I need her and pray she believes me.”
* * *
A string of violent and extraordinarily vile curses dropped from Sophie’s lips as she trudged through the mud in her favorite boots, her shawl dripping from her shoulders and her hat dangling from numb fingertips. She directed another curse over her shoulder in the direction of the inn. If Blake had already been duke, the bridge would have been strong enough to carry the horse and carriage over safely and she would have already made it to Violet’s to say her goodbyes.
For that’s what she was doing. Only she did it on foot with the rain still falling in sheets across the countryside. No sooner had she made it across the bridge on her own two feet, had there been a roar of water carrying half an uprooted tree in its current. She’d only just gotten to the slippery, grassy banks before the bridge had literally floated away before her eyes.
She prayed Matthew had a good horse in his barn that she could borrow. She’d made it to London from the house once before in the dead of night, she was sure she could do it again. From the city she would send the horse back and have her things collected. She never wanted to lay eyes on Blake again as long as she lived. But before she could leave, she had to say goodbye and tell Violet all about Blake’s claim to the title so someone else could harass him in her stead. She had no doubt the women of the village could talk some sense into his thick head. Once Charles fled, they would be on their own until the land reverted back to the crown and a new man could either buy or earn the title.
If she knew anything about the King, he would already have a man in mind. She wondered if that new man would find his place here, the place that she couldn’t.
“Stupid, pigheaded, stubborn idiot,” she mumbled. As if the heavens agreed with her, lightning lit the afternoon’s darkness and a crack of thunder made her jump. Within two steps, her nerves heightened from anger to apprehension.
Taking off in the storm hadn’t been the smartest of her latest moves and when Matthew’s farmhouse, the home of her somewhat happy childhood, came into view, she sighed and lengthened her stride. Her skirts pulled this way and that in the wind and her teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Why did he have to be so rude? Did the man not know how to bite his tongue and keep his opinions to himself? He certainly wouldn’t last long as a duke in the capital if he couldn’t learn to think before he spoke. Someone would call him out at the very first slight.
Lightning lit the sky again followed a split second later by another deafening crack of