Page 113 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Something about the way he was looking at her made Betsy’s stomach do strange things. “Very funny,” she said hoarsely, trying to make a joke of it. “Have you looked at me recently?”

“Every day.” There was nothing flippant about the way he said it, the way he was looking at her, as though there had never been anything more important or more precious in the world. “It’s the best part of my day. You’re the best part of my day.”

Betsy did her best to brazen it out. “Well, between me and Dr. Baird there’s not much to choose between. I suppose there is also Captain Dowdy—and Commander Anderson. I wouldn’t want you to have a hopeless passion for Colonel Yermsloff. You might wind up in Siberia.”

“Betsy.” That was all. Just her name. But it made her stop and swallow hard. “I know I don’t have much to offer you. . . .”

“You? Don’t have much to offer me?” Betsy could feel the panic rising up in her. Whatever else, whatever had happened on the Seneca, she couldn’t let Holt throw himself away on her. “I had a lover! I had a child out of wedlock! I do have a large fortune, so I suppose someone might be willing to overlook my other deficiencies. . . .”

“Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

“Don’t tell me how to talk about myself!” The last man who’d declared his love for her had been dead within a fortnight. Betsy glared up at him. “At least I’m traveling under my real name and not some sort of ridiculous nom de guerre!”

“It’s not a nom de guerre.” Holt looked at her, his emotions so bare on his face it was painful to behold. “Maybe it is. It’s my mother’s maiden name.”

He had told her that before, and she hadn’t realized then what it meant. Now she did, and it would have made her feel all sorts of things if she hadn’t been working so hard on feeling nothing at all.

Why wouldn’t he fight with her? That’s what they needed, a blazing row, so she could flounce off and he could storm off and be safe, safe from her, because he might delude himself that he loved her, but he couldn’t, not really, and if he did, then, well, it had to be stopped before he hurt himself. Before she hurt him.

“What’s your name?” Betsy demanded. Her voice sounded flat and hard. “Your real name.”

“Ambrose.”

“Ambrose?”

“Ambrose Charles Rutherford IV.” Holt’s lip twisted. “I didn’t choose it.”

“Ambrose.” There was no way to say it that made it sound any better. It was stuffed leather sofas and the law library at Harvard. It sounded like someone her brother would befriend at one of his clubs. “No wonder you ran off West and changed your name.”

He didn’t take the bait. “I did it because I didn’t want to carry my father’s name. I didn’t want any part of him. But I was fooling myself, wasn’t I? You can’t just shed that sort of thing.”

Betsy felt like crying. There was no fighting someone who wouldn’t fight back. He’d got under her guard; nothing was left but the raw truth.

“No. You can’t.” There was no just going back and starting over. There was no putting back the clock. “I’m damaged goods. Not just in the eyes of the world. Inside. In here. If I were a vase, I’d be in a thousand pieces.”

“You’re not a vase.” Only Holt could say that and make it sound like an endearment. “Besides, isn’t that what you do? Put broken things together again?”

“Well, yes, pots and inscriptions and . . .” She was losing the thread of the discussion. He had a way of doing that to her. “I know you mean well by all this. I know—oh, I don’t know what I know. But these are strange times. We’ve just been through a ridiculous amount together, and maybe right now you’re feeling grateful, and maybe it’s just because I was the one who was there—but I don’t want you to wake up a year from now and find yourself saddled with me. You could find yourself someone so much better. Someone not so—cracked.”

“There’s so much wrong with that I don’t even know where to begin. Do you really think I’d be proposing to Kit if circumstances were reversed? Or your friend with the eyebrows?”

“You’d have to fight Dr. Stringfellow for her.” But that wasn’t the real problem. Betsy forced herself to say it out loud. “Somewhere out there—maybe there’s someone fresh and new for you. Someone who hasn’t made so many mistakes. Someone who hasn’t hurt so many people.”

Oh, bother. There went the tears again. Betsy blinked them back furiously, not wanting Holt to see.

Gently, he wiped away the tears from under her eyes with a knuckle. “All of that you call mistakes—if I could have spared you the pain of it—I don’t know. It’s hard to think through what might have happened and who we might have been if our lives had been different. But the idea that having lived and endured makes you less worthy of love—that’s pure nonsense. I love you as you are. I love you because of what you are. I don’t want to erase your past or pretend it didn’t happen. Any more than I can erase mine.”

Betsy sniffed mightily. “What if I want to erase it?”

“Do you? Do you really?”

She wasn’t sure anymore. Betsy tried to remember the person she had been. But she wasn’t sure she had liked that person either. She wanted to scrub the dark spots out of her soul. She wanted to be someone who could be loved and not feel like that love ought to be better spent. She wanted things to be simple.

“I wanted to dig up pots,” she whispered. “I just wanted to dig up pots.”

“And inscriptions.” It was no fair looking at her like that, so tenderly, as though he understood. His hand found hers, their fingers twining together. Betsy clung to the comfort of that hand, even as she knew she should push him away. “I just wanted to go to law school.”

How had they both become so derailed? Like that train two miles from Tampa, stuck on the tracks in the middle of nowhere. Betsy remembered that night, the wilderness pressing close around them, the coal smoke everywhere, obscuring her sight, rasping her throat.