Page 88 of The Forsaken

Restless, she stood and paced, faster and faster, as if she could reach a speed with which she could run away from the—

The sonorous rumble of his deep chuckle drew her to an abrupt stop. She stared blankly at him as he stood—a tremble built in her body.

“Not to disappoint you, love, but I tripped over my heels and hit the floor.”

A tremble built deep within her. He was laughing. He was actually laughing about this.

Andromena flew at him. She pummeled her fists against his chest. “It is not funny!” she cried. “If anything were to happen to you, I would not survive. I would not want to.”

“Not another word!” A hiss sailed between his teeth.

Something in the intensity of his eyes penetrated. Andromena stared, wide-eyed. She waited a beat, letting her stillness linger for a split second before he spoke again. She saw something within his eyes, something she could not name, and she didn’t know whether to fear it.

Suddenly, his features spasmed. “There is no world I want any part of if you aren’t in it.”

She shook her head.

A pained smile played over his lips. “Ah, darling. I am not supposed to want you.”

“You want me?”

“You don’t know that?” He wandered to the table; once scrubbed daily, with sand and soap to keep it clean, now cracked. “How could you? How when I failed to tell you?”

She followed his fixed eyes to the AMS etched within the fir surface. Edgar raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question. She nodded. They were her initials carved as a child. With a faraway smile, he traced each initial and the heart surrounding them.

No words were needed between she and Edgar. She had longed for what her siblings had— to know such harmony of thought with another soul. And she found it with, and in, Edgar.

“I was an utter stunned idiot in the grotto,” he said. “You make me crave the forbidden.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Forbidden makes me sound like I’m some sort of prize or object. I’m not. I’m my own woman.”

“I am well aware,” he said, with such tenderness that a new trembling took hold. He quit his spot at the table, and came closer. “But that does not change that you are Culross’s sister-in-law.”

She opened her mouth to tell him precisely her thoughts on that stuff and rot, but Edgar drew her into his arms, and she went, as she always did, on a sigh.

“Do you know how Culross and I became friends?”

That came out of nowhere: not an ‘explanation’ about why they couldn’t be together, rather, another piece of his past he shared with her. What he proffered instead was a different intimacy. The one she craved most from him.

He let her in all over again; just as deeply as before. What he shared was the tragedy of his childhood. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if it were some other boy, and not himself, who had suffered so.

With every horror he shared, the cruel things done and said, she focused on breathing. She drew in each breath slowly through her nose and out. He had suffered so. She would not add her tears.

Edgar finished on a shrug. “When I was beat up and bullied as a scrawny lad with a publicly known family, Culross saved me. I owe him my life.”

Poor, poor Edgar. But proud Edgar would hate that response.

As it turned out, he hated her next words with similar passion. “You do not owe him anything, Edgar”

“Of course, I do.” He scoffed with all the arrogance of a man who knew absolutely nothing, but believed he knew everything. “He saved me.”

By that logic, if she prevented him from harm, he’d feel indebted. She didn’t want that, and felt confident neither did her brother-in-law.

She brought her palms up. He stiffened; the moment she rested her hands on his chest and stroked the place where his heart was, the tension eased, some.

“If you think that you are indebted to the earl, or if he made you feel that way, then he hasn’t been a very good friend to you, or you don’t truly understand friendship, or both.”

A dark lock tumbled across his brow, completing his look of confused-boy.