quietly.
She looked up at him with a breathless laugh. “Do you know, I think it would have been easier if I’d met you sooner. Or later. Any time but now.”
His brow furrowed. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Because I’m not making any sense, am I? I’m mucking it all up, just like I thought I would.” She started to stand. “I should probably just go and–”
“No.” Leo spoke with a vehemence that startled them both. Calliope froze half in and half out of her chair. He cleared his throat. Ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. “I meant to say, if that’s truly what you want to do…of course I wouldn’t stop you. But I’d rather you stay.” He met her wide-eyed gaze. “Please.”
As she slowly sank back down the breath he hadn’t even known he’d been holding expelled in a soft whoosh of air.
“All right.” She gave a tiny nod. “But if you want me to leave after I’ve told you, I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest.”
“I don’t think that will happen,” he said gruffly.
“I didn’t think this would ever happen,” she said with a small smile, and Leo’s chest tightened when her hand flicked between them. “Yet here we are.”
She felt it too, then. This invisible force. This unspoken connection. This acknowledgement of two souls recognizing each other through time and space. He was afraid it had all been in his head. That he’d been projecting what he wanted onto Calliope. That he’d been exaggerating it. But he hadn’t. He wasn’t. Because she felt it too.
Whatever it was, whatever it meant, she felt it too.
And nothing she could say would change that.
“After my uncle passed, we were visited by his solicitor. Mr. Highwater-Cleary was very nice. Very kind.” She sipped her tea, and her eyes met his over the small porcelain cup. “Like you. He told us the terms of my uncle’s will. The title and the main estate, of course, passed down the bloodline to a third cousin. Along with the bulk of the fortune. But everything else, including the house in London, all went to…”
“Your aunt?” Leo guessed when she trailed off.
Calliope shook her head. “No. It all went to me.”
He frowned at her expression. “Isn’t that good news? Is there something I’m missing?”
“There was a contingency written into the will.” She looked down at her hands. “The solicitor believed my uncle intended to change the date, but he died before he was able to. In short, if I am not married before my twenty-first birthday, my inheritance will pass to my cousin Beatrice.”
“How old are you, Calliope?” he asked slowly.
When she looked up and smiled, it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I will turn twenty-one years of age the Friday after next.”
There wasn’t very much math to calculate. “Then that means…”
“If I wish to keep my inheritance, then I need to find someone to marry within fourteen days.”
The pieces came together with sudden clarity. “That’s why Helena came to see me. Why she called in her favor. Why she wanted me to dance with you at the ball.”
Calliope swallowed. “Yes.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t want this to come between us.” She gazed at him helplessly. “I don’t want you to think I was trying to trick you.
And yet, wasn’t that exactly what she’d done?
Ice washed over Leo. Into him. It filled his veins. His blood. His heart. “Then there’s only one thing we can do.”
She wet her lips. “What is that?”
“Get married.”
Chapter Ten
“Is the priest ready?” Calliope whispered, her gaze darting nervously to the church doors. Helena nodded with unguarded enthusiasm.
“Any moment,” she said brightly. “They’ll let us know when it’s time.”
Beyond the tall church tower with its large bronze bell, the sun was slowly sinking into a pink and orange sky. Soon night would fall, and when it did Calliope would emerge through those doors not as an orphan or a wallflower or a spinster, titles that had followed her through her entire life, but as a wife.
A wife.
She could hardly believe it, and a tremulous smile curved her lips as she waited to be called inside the church. A gust of wind stirred, catching on the train of her gown and pulling at the plain blue shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders. She trembled, and Helena noted the tiny, involuntary motion with an arched russet brow.
“Are you nervous?” she asked.
“Yes,” Calliope admitted, for she was. Nervous and excited and happy and afraid. The emotions were all jumbled up inside of her,