Spinster Ever After (The Spinster Chronicles #7) - Rebecca Connolly Page 0,7
replied with a firm nod.
He shrugged as if that should have been her answer.
She frowned at his gesture. “I’m afraid that I missed it, Michael.”
“I don’t think that sort of thing is easily missed,” he retorted, scrunching up his face for effect. “You’d have to be really thick to miss the lightning bolts and singing angels and feelings of imminent death.”
A sharp thump across his chest nearly set him off balance, but he recovered swiftly enough, pushing to his feet and moving back a safe distance.
Charlotte skewered him with a dark look. “You are hopelessly unromantic.”
“I’ve heard.” He smiled blandly and folded his arms.
She watched him for a long moment, then slumped on a resigned sigh. “I wanted love to find me, Michael. I don’t need marriage, not in the way others do, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to be alone with my money.”
It sounded so cold when she put it that way, but the reality was that she’d summed it up neatly there. Unpleasantly, but neatly.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she went on. “Love was supposed to happen to me, not be hunted for. Did I miss it?”
“No,” he said before he could stop himself. “No, you didn’t miss it.”
She didn’t reply, but her attention was on him still. As though he hadn’t finished. As though he had more of an answer or explanation.
He could have. He had answers aplenty, and he’d waited years to give them. He could end all of this right now, end it for them both. He wasn’t a man of speeches, but he’d do his damnedest to be one now.
It was time. It had to be.
He stared back at her, willing the words to come.
“It might be that you’re meant to be the huntress, Charlotte, rather than the hunted.”
Michael blinked at the words, wondering what idiot was saying them at a moment like this. And why they were said in his exact way of speaking and tone of voice.
Oh. His voice.
Idiot.
Charlotte stared at him as though she were thinking the very same thing, though Michael knew full well she was not. She already knew he was an idiot; there was no need to hash it out again. This was not directed at him at all. It was a realization too late and feeling ridiculous for that fact.
“Bloody hell, Michael,” Charlotte hissed, her gaze turning to the window as she shook her head. “Why didn’t you say this before?”
“I don’t tend to consider the reasons for your lack of marital state on the regular, you know,” he told her with as much indignation as he could muster. “You never said much bemoaning the subject, so why would it even occur to me?”
She didn’t seem to hear him, her brow furrowing as she considered his words. “A huntress. You think so?”
She was going to torture him again and again if he didn’t somehow put an end to this conversation. Telling her to look for love? Knowing she would never look where he wanted her to?
Michael watched her for a long moment, making the decision he told himself he never would, and soaking in the sight of her as though he would never see her again in his life.
“You said so yourself,” he answered, surprised his voice was as clear as it was. “You’re an heiress. Marriage would actually hinder your independence, factually speaking, so if it is something you want in spite of the logic there, you are going to have to do the work to find it.”
“A marriage of love is what I want,” she replied, still not looking at him, “not a marriage for the sake of it.”
The words lashed across his heart, and he inhaled sharply, but silently. “Then find it, Charlotte. If you want it, go and get it.”
As though he had spoken to a soldier before battle, Charlotte rose to her feet, her brow clear and her expression set. “Yes. I intend to.” She nodded and began to stride from the room, pausing as she passed him to look in his eyes and smile with all the warmth she had ever done. “What would I do without you, Michael?”
With a quick stretching of her smile, she continued out of the room, her fingers briefly grazing his hand as she did so.
His skin burned fiercely at the contact, and the feel of it was all the more poignant for the silence in the now empty room.
“We’re about to find out,” he murmured in reply, though there was no one