The Countess Conspiracy

She had no idea what she said to end the interview, how she took leave of her sister. It began to drizzle on the way home; she heard the drops against the roof of her carriage. She was met with an umbrella at her home and ushered into the warm interior, but she didn’t belong there either.

She wandered from room to room, her eyes moving from the false versions of La Mode Illustrée that she used to hide her inclinations from prying eyes to the knitting she used to make herself look innocuous.

She’d only begun to knit because her father had banished her from his gardens. Even her knitting was a lie, an illusion of calm industriousness that she used to hide all her internal turmoil.

Everything about her was a lie. And with good reason—the truth was so very ugly.

So ugly that even Violet shrank from it in cowardice.

She changed to a simple gown and slipped out to her greenhouse. The rain had begun to pour down, but she didn’t take an umbrella. The cold, fat drops that pelted her skin seemed a just punishment.

Even her work was a lie. It wasn’t hers; nobody recognized it as such. And doing it was pointless, since nobody would present it any longer. She’d been lying to herself these last weeks.

She looked down.

Soaking seeds, trying to coax them to germinate? That illusion of fertility was the biggest lie of them all.

She was a blacksmith’s puzzle without a solution. Her faults never lay in the beginning of her acquaintances, but at the end—when she drove everyone who cared for her away. It was only a question of how long it took them to ferret out the truth.

Nothing was what she was; nothing was what she gave to those foolish enough to care for her. Nothing was what she deserved, and so nothing had been what she got. It didn’t matter how hard she tried or what she did.

At the end of the day she was a selfish, pointless, lying coward.

She put her hands over her ears, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t make that whisper go away. It wasn’t a voice, after all. It was just her own memory, and Violet’s memory was a harsh, terrible thing.

She couldn’t make it go away. She couldn’t prove herself wrong. Maybe, it was time to demonstrate how right she was. Deep down, she had always known that if anyone knew the truth…

Well. Even Sebastian would know how impossible it was to care for her. Violet took all the feelings that she’d packed away, all the hurts and lost desires, the things she dared not let herself feel.

And she wanted. She wanted to be held so badly that it hurt. She wanted someone to say that she was wrong, that she mattered. She wanted to stop lying.

Outside, thunder rumbled. Violet knocked a row of empty pots to the ground. They broke into useless shards, stinging her skin. Rain was falling in such quantity that she could scarcely see her back-garden wall. She doubted Sebastian would be in his garden, not in this downpour.

Coward. Liar.

She couldn’t wait. A little thing like rain wasn’t going to stop her from telling the truth and losing everything, once and for all.

Chapter Thirteen

SEBASTIAN WAS IN HIS GREENHOUSE trying to sort out the muddle of his feelings when the rain began to come down in earnest. It fell in great sheets out of nowhere, a fury of water. It obscured the view of his shrubbery, ten yards distant, washing the entire world in gray. The air chilled and the panes of glass on his greenhouse began to fog over.

He was searching for the umbrella he was almost certain he’d left among the hooks and jackets at the entry when the door opened.

He turned, expecting one of his servants, perhaps bearing the umbrella he needed—but it was Violet.

He saw her skin first. She was wearing a simple gown of gray muslin, the sort of thing she wore to work in her greenhouse. Calling it a gown was being overly generous. Now it was a bedraggled, dripping cloth, one that clung to Violet’s curves in ways that he suspected she really didn’t want him to see.

Violet swiped back a sopping braid and slammed the door shut behind her. The frame of the house rattled, shook by the wind. He couldn’t read the expression on her face. It might have been sad; it might have been defiant. A bead of water slid to the end of her nose, and her hands curled into fists at her side.

“Violet?” he asked. “Whatever is the matter?”

Her chin went up. Those fists at her side clenched into tight balls, and she came toward him, step by squelching step. She advanced on him as if he were an enemy force to be surrounded. She was a full half-foot shorter than he was, and yet somehow that martial light in her eyes made him want to back away.

She stopped an inch before him. “Violet,” he breathed.

“I have been concealing the truth from you.” She announced this in cold tones. At her side, her hand clenched, then unclenched. “You think that I have no physical desire for you.” Her eyes bored into his in sharp challenge.

Sebastian didn’t know what to think; his entire being seemed to catch fire, breathlessly awaiting the completion of that thought.

“You think I don’t want you.” She brushed more rain from her face. “You’re wrong. I can’t stop thinking about you. About what it would be like to…” She swallowed. “To hold you. And touch you.” Another pause. “You see how wrong you were? I desire you.”

Yes, some part of him was chanting. Yes, yes, yes.

But it was all so horribly wrong—that fist at her side, as if she needed protection from him, that glare in her eyes. The way she threw out the word desire as if it were a knife, one she intended to use to disembowel him.

“I don’t understand.” He took a step back. “Something is wrong.”

Her eyes glittered.

“Shut up,” she said, and before he knew what she was doing, she launched herself at him. There was no other word for it. One minute, she was standing before him, bristling in bedraggled fury; the next, her hands were on his shoulders and her lips were seeking his.

He’d imagined kissing Violet so many times that at first, he let it happen. Her mouth was cold and her hands were shaking, but that—he could tell himself—was the rain, and it would stop once he warmed her. He didn’t want to ask what had changed. He didn’t care why she was kissing him. He’d loved her for years and she was here. He pulled her close and she didn’t shrink from him. Her kiss was all ferocity, no tenderness. Her tongue warred with his before they’d even had a chance to warm up to one another. And while he tried to hold her close, her hands slid all over him—down the lapels of his coat, tracing the buttons on his trousers.