The Countess Conspiracy

by Courtney Milan

  She was good at being made of stone. She imagined herself flint, hard enough to strike sparks. “I’m sorry. So sorry. I don’t—I can’t—”

  She couldn’t. She couldn’t love him, no matter how much some part of her yearned to do it.

  “No, I understand. That’s what I’m trying to say. Just because you make me burn doesn’t mean I’m suffering. I have always known that even though you weren’t in love with me, you loved me, too.”

  The air she took into her lungs seemed too thick. She couldn’t think, couldn’t look him in the eyes. He was right, so right. She’d never wanted to admit it, but…he was right.

  Never again. Especially not with him.

  “That’s it,” she said hopefully. “Yes. We love each other—just not in the physical way. There’s no lust. It’s purely platonic.”

  She stopped at the look in his eyes.

  “It’s purely platonic,” she repeated. But she heard her own voice rising in question. “Right?”

  “No,” he said. “God, no.” His eyes were hot, boring into hers. For a moment, she could almost feel the warmth of what he felt licking against her navel, slowly sinking lower. “I don’t love you platonically,” he said. “I want you. I want you very, very much. If you wanted to go to bed with me, Violet, I’d take you there. Right now.” He shrugged, and that wave of heat dissipated. He gave her a smile. “But you don’t.”

  She let out a gasping breath. He’d got it wrong after all.

  “Sebastian…” she started to say.

  But he leaned toward her, bridging the gap between them, and set his finger against her lips. “Shh,” he whispered. “There’s no need to apologize for not feeling the same way. I understand.”

  He didn’t mean it as a liberty. He touched her the way one dearest friend touched another—for comfort, for support. To let her know that he knew how she felt.

  She didn’t jerk away as she ought to have done—because he didn’t know, and she didn’t want it said.

  “I can’t,” Violet heard herself say. “I can’t. I can’t be that person, Sebastian. I can’t.” But she could feel that old, unwanted desire waken inside her, curling deep in her belly like poison. If she let it in—if she let down her guard—it would fill her up and she’d lose everything.

  “Violet,” he said. “How could I say I loved you and expect you to do something you didn’t want? The last thing I want is for you to be anyone but yourself.” His hand fell on her shoulder. “You should know—this is me. I love you.”

  He didn’t know what he was saying. He didn’t know how much it hurt to bottle up her wants. She made her shoulder blades into steel, willing them to stay rigid against his onslaught. She was a thing of gears and metal, strong like clockwork, and she wouldn’t melt down into tears. She didn’t want. She didn’t desire. She didn’t need to be taken to bed.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered.

  For this tiny moment, she allowed herself to need one thing: to be held. She needed it so badly that she didn’t move. Even though the warmth of his fingers stirred sensations, images that left her half-heated and half-frozen. One whispered word from her and they could trade real touches, skin on skin. They could fall into desire. She could have everything—love, warmth, companionship.

  She could have cramps and agony and the sick certainty that this time, she might not survive.

  Only Sebastian would dare to love her, and he didn’t know everything.

  Violet shut her eyes and let his fingers whisper to her of comfort. Everything else, she’d do without.

  “Shh. It’s just the way things are. Nothing has to change if you don’t wish it. Nothing at all.”

  “How do we go on?” she whispered.

  “Simple,” he said. “One day at a time. We’ll go to Oliver’s wedding, and we’ll tell jokes with each other. We’ll fall into our old friendship.”

  “And you’ll change your mind,” she said with a glimmer of hope. That was it—this was a passing fancy on his part. “How long has it been since you last had a lover? You’ve just spent so much time around me, you’ve fooled yourself.”

  There was a long pause.

  “That is it, isn’t it?” she repeated.

  “No.” He smiled at her. “No, it really isn’t. But just watch. Nothing has to change.”

  EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED.

  Violet wished she could pretend, but she couldn’t. No matter how she feigned nonchalance, she could tell that she was playing a role. Sebastian greeted her with a smile a few days later, when Violet and her maid met him at the train station. It was precisely the same smile he gave to their friends, Robert Blaisdell, the Duke of Clermont, and his wife, Minerva, when they arrived a few moments later—friendly and open, as if he had nothing to hide but the conclusion of his latest joke.

  But she knew better.

  She was aware of him throughout the train ride that followed—long and slow, stopping every few miles for one little hamlet or another. From her seat at the window, she watched the fields of summer grains. She tried to count the varieties of barley.

  Easier than looking at Sebastian and remembering his words.

  He glanced at her, catching her gaze momentarily, and he dropped her a lazy wink.

  Her breath stopped. She turned away too hastily—and yet she wasn’t quick enough. The damage had been done. Ignoring her own feelings was easy enough; she’d done it for so long that it seemed second nature to her.

  Ignoring his? God, he was a rake. And he wanted to…he wanted to…

  No. She faced directly ahead and engaged the duchess in exclusive conversation for the remainder of the journey. Minnie was shy when you first met her—something that made people overlook her. But she was also clever, and once you got her talking, she could say a great deal. Enough to give Violet an excuse to avoid conversing with Sebastian.

  It was only when they got to the other end of their trip that Violet realized how impossible the next few days were going to be.

  New Shaling, the tiny village where Oliver hailed from and where his wedding was to take place, had only one inn. That inn had only one private dining room to be shared among all the visitors.

  She wouldn’t be able to avoid Sebastian, no matter how hard she tried. So she did what she always did: She fell back on her mother’s rules.

  Just because an endeavor is impossible doesn’t mean you should give up on it.

  Sebastian didn’t look at her any more than he looked at anyone else. Nothing had changed—nothing, except that every time he glanced in her direction, she felt a shot of heat. She wasn’t going to stop feeling it any time soon; if she could make her unfortunate wants go away, she’d have excised them long before.

  So while Robert was joking with the innkeeper about the quantity of beef they’d likely consume, while Sebastian was drawing Minnie out by asking her questions about the latest vote in Parliament, Violet slipped up the stairs and shut herself in her room.

  What couldn’t be changed could be avoided.

  Chapter Seven

  NOBODY BUT SEBASTIAN SEEMED to notice Violet’s absence from lunch. Nobody raised an objection to a walk in the countryside with her whereabouts unknown.

  She’d seemed distracted throughout the journey here—scarcely concentrating on Minnie’s words, always looking off into the distance. She had the look of a woman focused intently on a problem.

  Sebastian knew what was plaguing her all too well. He felt the other half of her worry, a weight dragging down on him. I don’t want to lose you.

  So he pleaded fatigue when Minnie and Robert left to go on a walk with Oliver and Jane. While his other friends stepped out, he ordered a tray from the kitchen and made his way up the stairs.

  She did not answer his light rap, and—after glancing down the hall and verifying that it was, in fact, empty—Sebastian juggled the tray he was holding and opened her door.

  The room was cozy and clean, the furniture simply made. A window looked out on an idyllic sum
mer meadow, but Violet was not watching the view. She sat at her desk, her head bowed over a few sheets of stationery. She was writing at a furious pace. She didn’t look around, not even when Sebastian let the door shut with a bang. She had no idea he was even in the room. Typical. He found himself smiling.

  He walked to her side, set down the tray, and pulled up a chair.

  If he’d had any talent at drawing, he could have reproduced a picture of this from memory: Violet, unaware of her surroundings. Her lips were pursed; she focused on the paper in front of her with the singular intensity of a cat watching a butterfly. He’d seen her like this a thousand times—more than a thousand, actually. When Violet became engrossed in a project, she lost track of where she was and what she was doing. He’d often wondered if she found it disorienting to look up and discover half the day gone. One day, the house she was in would burn to the ground. When that happened, she would look up hours later, blinking, wondering why she was surrounded by charred walls and ashes.

  He’d enjoyed the charade at first, in part because he’d enjoyed the work itself. But it had been more than that. When he’d been presenting her work, there had been moments when he’d had her attention. He’d practiced his presentations in front of her, and had found himself at the center of her considerable focus. She’d looked at him as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

  He let out a slow breath. The only way he’d ever been able to catch her attention was when he’d talked to her about anything other than herself. Every time he’d hinted at more, she’d refused to see it—as if every aspect of Sebastian as a man was as irrelevant as…as…

  As a building burning down around her while she was thinking about something else.

  He could shout at her about it. He might as well shout at a kitten for having fur.

  She was still writing furiously. Not just swiftly—now that he was watching her, he could tell that she was angry about whatever had caught her attention. Even from ten feet away, he could see the jagged lines her pen made, the grim set of her mouth. Her eyes narrowed at the page.

  Maybe she was writing a letter about the cruelty of using steel traps to catch garden pests—one of the topics that occasionally occupied her time. Maybe she was writing a response to a fellow scientist.

  That was the thing about Violet. You never knew what had caught her fancy, whether trivial or of the greatest importance. You only knew that she wouldn’t see anything around her until she’d finished with it.

  Seconds of waiting turned into minutes. The light in the room shifted slowly; the shadow cast by his chair lengthened, inch by inch.

  Her anger seemed to ebb as he watched, slowly changing into something he couldn’t quite place on the emotional spectrum. Resignation, maybe? Eventually, as he had known she must, Violet put down her pen and pushed aside her paper.

  Watching her come back into a recognition of her surroundings was always something of a joy. She blinked as if she had just come out of a cave and her eyes needed to adjust to the light. She stretched: spine arching, arms extending, fingers spreading wide and then clenching into a fist. She drew in a breath and looked up.

  Her gaze landed on Sebastian. For a few moments, she stared at him. “Oh,” she said in puzzlement. “I suppose I did hear someone come in. I should have known it was you when you didn’t disturb me.”

  “I know better than to disturb you.”

  She regarded him warily before finally offering a hint of a smile. “You’re one of the only people that I can work around. Being around you is like being around nobody at all.”

  “Thank you,” Sebastian said gravely, trying to hide his smile in response. Only Violet would say something like that and intend it as a compliment.

  She blinked again. “Wait one moment. I was trying to avoid you.” She spoke with perfect bluntness. “For God’s sake, I was writing you an angry letter.”

  “Oh, really?” he asked. “That was for me?” He started to lean in so he could read her words, but she flipped the papers over.

  “No.” She pursed her lips. “It’s much too rude for me to deliver.”

  That didn’t normally stop her. He simply folded his arms and waited.

  She sniffed. “And selfish. Also, I called you a great many names.”

  “You mean I sat here for an hour watching you shout at me in your head?” He was unaccountably tickled by the notion. Here he’d been imagining fascinating thoughts on her part, something about cats or steel traps. She’d been thinking of him. “That’s lovely, Violet. But you’re allowed to shout at me in reality. What did I do this time?”

  She let out a sigh and looked away. “That’s the problem. You didn’t do…anything. I sat down and wrote an entire diatribe, and the whole time I was writing, I realized how horrid I was being. Half the reason I was angry was because I knew I was being dreadfully unreasonable.”

  She played with the pen on her desk, rolling it uneasily beneath her fingers.

  “This is about what I told you the other day?” he asked.

  Her lips thinned, but she gave him a jerky nod.

  “And let me guess your complaint: ‘You’re my best friend. How dare you care for me!’”

  Another nod, but this one came with a flush of color on her cheeks.

  “I’m a daring man,” Sebastian said lightly. “An intrepid explorer. I have done many things.”

  “Yes,” she responded in almost the same tone. “You braved the wasteland of Violet Waterfield, the dangerous shark-infested waters of her most treacherous coasts. And you lived to tell the tale.”

  There was a hard light in her eyes as she spoke.

  You’re not a wasteland, he wanted to say. She’d do anything for the people she loved—anything, except take compliments from them.

  So he just shrugged. “I brought tea for the wasteland,” he informed her.

  “What? Why? Are you practicing to become a footman?”

  “No. I’m practicing to be a pest.”

  “You don’t need any practice. You’re already an expert.”

  She flushed and looked away—but Sebastian felt a flush of pleasure. If she could tease him, she was beginning to feel comfortable again. “Perfection of all kinds requires constant practice,” he intoned. “Besides, you didn’t have breakfast or lunch. You’re hungry.”

  “I didn’t?” She frowned. “I am?”

  He waited.

  “Oh,” she said in some surprise after a little pause. “I am.”

  He crossed the room and uncovered the items on the tray. He’d had experience enough with Violet that he’d made sure to ask for only those things that could survive an hour or so on a tray—cheese, apples, an array of summer vegetables, a selection of bread. A few sweet biscuits and a pot of now tepid tea rounded out the tray.

  “It’s dangerous for you to not be on good terms with me,” Sebastian told her. “You’re not eating enough. That’s one of the things I’m good for—making sure you eat.”

  “Nonsense.” She reached for an apple.

  He took her left hand in his. She stopped entirely as he did so, her eyes looking up at him wide and unblinking. As if she expected him to do something more than touch her.

  “Don’t worry, Violet,” he said, a little more sarcastically than he intended. “I’ll hold off on seducing you until tomorrow. I just want to prove a point.” He turned over her wrist and held up his hand. “See?” He slid three fingers between her cuff and her wrist. “This gown used to fit perfectly.” He rotated his fingers, demonstrating. “Look how much extra space there is now. You’re not eating.”

  “No, I am,” she said with a frown. “I’m sure I am. I have dinner. And breakfast.” A larger frown. “Most days.”

  “You’re not eating,” Sebastian said, “and you’re not even noticing that you’re not eating. Do I have to set your maid on you?”

  “Won’t work,” Violet muttered. “Louisa’s too timid. That’s why I hired her.” She refused to look at him. “Damn it, Sebast
ian. Why do you have to be so…so…”

  He waggled an eyebrow at her.

  “So necessary?” she finished.

  “Oh, Violet.” He grinned at her. “That was almost polite.”

  She made a little noise. “A few weeks ago, I told you I wouldn’t even notice if you disappeared. The truth is, I’ve noticed. Every time I look up, I notice.” Her voice was soft. “Every time I notice, I feel awful. And every time I feel awful, I look away. You’re my…”

  He leaned forward.

  “My best friend,” she concluded. “And I hate you for it.”

  They’d worked out a system of code over the years—sentences they used to hide their true meanings from the entire world. I hate you was not part of their code, but it felt like it: words that Violet used because she couldn’t bring herself to say what she really meant. It had not been lost on Sebastian that when Violet needed codes for I need you and come see me, she’d chosen phrases that bordered on rude.

  “That’s so sweet,” he said gravely. “I hate you, too, Violet.”

  She ducked her head, looking away from him. Hearing everything that he’d said in words that nobody but the two of them would ever understand.

  “Now eat.”

  She did.

  “I wish my genius ran to making automatons,” he said. “I would invent one that would follow you around with a tray. It would wait patiently for you to look up from whatever you were doing, and as soon as you did, it would say, ‘Lady Cambury, you must have something to eat.’”

  She swallowed her bite of apple. “That would be extremely annoying.”

  “I do not consider that a detriment.”

  “I consider it a waste of a good automaton. I would modify your invention,” she said, reaching for some cheese. “I’d dress my version up in my best silk and send it out to pay morning calls. Oh, how I hate making morning calls. It wouldn’t need much of a vocabulary. ‘Yes,’ my automaton would say, ‘this weather is dreadful, isn’t it?’ In fact, I think that’s how I would do it. Whatever the other person says, it would answer, ‘Yes, it most certainly is, isn’t it?’ My automaton would have perfect manners.”