The Countess Conspiracy

It was so unfair that she couldn’t even gasp in outrage. Not that she wanted to marry him. God, no. Quite the opposite. But that wasn’t the point. “Have it your way.” She straightened in her chair and looked away. “I won’t.”

She couldn’t put it aside, no matter how she tried. Of course she wasn’t the sort of woman who caught Sebastian’s fancy. He’d said as much himself. But they were friends of long standing. Couldn’t he even pretend to laugh? Was she so awful that even a joke about marrying her disgusted him?

“It’s not as if you raised any expectations,” she told him. “I know how things stand between us. I’m not up to your standards.”

He let out a long, slow breath. “I should never have said that.” His hands squeezed together. “I hate getting angry.”

“Why? Was it a falsehood?”

His lips pressed together. “I should… Perhaps I should have phrased it differently. But…” He looked up, as if beseeching the heavens to make her stop.

Her stomach cramped. It didn’t matter. Her pain was irrelevant. She’d never let herself do anything so foolish as want him. There was no point in feeling hurt simply because a man she refused to want didn’t want her back.

“Phrase it however you like,” she snapped. “The sentiment remains the same.”

He stood. His gaze caught hers. She didn’t want to look in his eyes, but she couldn’t look away. There was something wild in his expression—something feral and dark. Something she didn’t understand.

“Do you want to know why you don’t meet my standards?” he asked.

She shook her head in mortification.

“Too late,” he replied. “Here’s my most important rule: Never have intercourse when one of the parties is in love with the other. It won’t end well.”

She gasped. Her whole world turned gray. “You arrogant cad! I’m not in love with you.”

“I know.” He didn’t look away from her. “Isn’t that what I said? Only one of us is in love, and it isn’t you.”

Violet stared at him. Her ears appeared to be working; her brain seemed to function. Tentatively, she added two and three and verified that they still made five.

They did. And what of three and two? They also made five. The commutative property of addition was still in force, and yet her entire world had just tilted upside down. Sebastian had said…

He had just implied…

Oh, no. She must have misunderstood. He was wealthy and handsome and so charming. He had women in quantity. He could have anyone—anyone not overly nice about the proprieties, that was. And Violet was…was herself. It didn’t make any sense.

And yet it made a horrific sort of sense—one she didn’t want to acknowledge. Her heart hammered inside her, and some part of her chanted in tune with the rhythm.

No, no. No, no. No, no, no, no, no. Impossible. Every word he had just spoken was impossible.

She licked her lips. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He was watching her with a little smile, as if he’d said nothing untoward at all.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she repeated, as if that would drive away the words he’d said. “That’s—that’s…” She stopped, took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. Her head was spinning as if she’d stood too quickly. “You’ve never given any indication that you…”

His lips wrenched. “Violet, I played a role for you for five years. I bought a house near yours in London and installed gates by hand so we could talk about your work in secret. Don’t tell me that I’ve never given any indication that I loved you.”

Her throat closed. She couldn’t speak.

“For five years,” he said, “I’ve been your best friend, your confidante. I’ve been the one who has known everything about you.” He didn’t move toward her. “And yes, Violet. I’ve loved you.”

She was still reeling from his disclosure. “But you’ve never said anything.”

“Maybe I should have,” he said simply. “But…you were married. How was I supposed to bring up the subject? And then your husband died, and you were in…” He paused. “Mourning,” he said, although they both knew that it had been nothing so simple. “And after that, well… You know how it works. I flirted with you; you never responded. You’ve never responded to anyone who flirts with you, Violet. So, yes. I held my tongue. But if I don’t say anything now, you’ll be forever misunderstanding everything I say, everything I do.”

“You flirt with everyone.” She shut her eyes and pressed her fingers against her forehead. “It…it didn’t…” But she couldn’t tell him it had never meant anything. It had. It had, even if she could not express what it had meant. “Sebastian, you’re not the kind of man who falls in love with a woman and suffers in silence.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. He simply looked at her. For the first time in her life, she had no idea what was in his mind.

He settled back into his chair. “Have you ever tasted a really good curry?”

“What has that to do with anything?”

“If you’re not prepared for that first taste,” he said, “the spice can be painful. It overwhelms everything. It burns your tongue, burns your throat all the way down. I suppose there are some people who take one bite and think they’ll never have anything like it again.”

“This is going to turn into a dreadful analogy,” Violet said.

“I’m only saying that there are a great many ways to suffer. Do you remember when you asked me to play along with you? After that first paper came out, and there was that initial swell of interest?”

After all this time, even a confession of love couldn’t completely destroy their friendship. Violet felt the corners of her mouth twitch up. “How could I forget?”

“I told you that it was impossible. That I wasn’t equipped to do it. That in order for me to present your work as my own, I’d need to understand everything behind it. I would have to know arcane details of natural philosophy, and I could never manage to do anything like that.”

“What rubbish.” Violet sniffed.

“That’s exactly what you said.” Sebastian smiled over at her. “You called it rubbish. You gave that little sniff of disbelief—there, that one. And you acted as if I had said the most ridiculous thing in the world.”