Page 69 of Stuck

He grunted. “In that case, fair warning, there’s a chance I might be sick.”

We both stewed in silence on that delightful prospect for a moment or two. It wasn’t a comfortable silence. Not that I was intimidated or nervous in any way, but I was intensely aware of it, unlike at the hospital with Darcy. The contrast was odd, considering that I’d known George for years and Darcy for a matter of weeks.

“Ugh! I hate this!” I growled at the ceiling.

George raised his eyebrows. “Not exactly my idea of fun, either, Shortie.”

“No, I don’t mean being stuck, although… not a fan. I mean Darcy. I’m so angry with him!”

Wickham gave me an indecipherable look. “What did you do to make him think you’d sold him out?”

“Let’s see…” I counted off the charges on my fingers as I listed them. “I went for a drink with an old friend, I showed an interest in his farming techniques, and I was too nice to him.”

“Too nice?”

“Yes, in order to charm his secrets out of him, apparently.” I formed the words with bitter intent, but when they hit the air, they sounded pathetically forlorn.

George huffed dismissively. “He’s way off base with that one. You are, of course, bewitching, but you’d never use your superpower for evil.”

I smiled, but it felt heavy and didn’t last long. “You know the most annoying thing? I really liked him. More than I’ve liked anyone in a long time. I thought he was one of the good ones, you know? We talked—about stuff that matters. And we had all these little moments where I started to think… Ugh, it sounds dumb now, but I was sure we had a connection. That he got me. It’s been such a long time since I felt understood like that.”

Infuriatingly, my eyes welled up with tears.

George looked oddly conflicted. “I didn’t realise you and he had a thing going on.”

“We don’t. Turns out, he doesn’t think much of me at all. So little, in fact, that he believes I’d cheat on someone.”

Mary’s admonishment, delivered in her typical no-nonsense style earlier that afternoon, sprang instantly to mind. “You lied to him, Lizzy. What was he supposed to think, seeing you with another man? For the record, I also want to throw you out for letting George Wickham kiss any part of your body. He’s a reptile. Please never allow it again.”

Said reptile pulled a disbelieving face. “Geez, he couldn’t have you more wrong. You once threw a pint in my face for copping off with someone else, and it wasn’t even you I was cheating on.”

I sniffed because I was crying freely now. “The punchline here being that it’s you he thinks I’m messing around with.”

“Me?”

“I told him it was nonsense, but he was adamant we were up to something. Why is beyond me. I can’t think of a single explanation.” I swiped at my tears and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “And okay, I suppose I haven’t been entirely honest with him, so maybe he’s got good reason to think I’m a cheating, thieving lowlife, but you? All he knows about you is that we went to university together.”

George choked on air. “That’s not strictly true.”

I paused, my breath stuttering in and out of me like I was a little girl trying her hardest not to cry. “Huh?”

His mouth twisted with what looked a lot like guilt. “I used to work for him.”

I blinked a few times, my brain moving sluggishly to parse his meaning. “You know each other?”

“We do. And, I’ll be honest, if he thinks we’re together, then… yeah, he’s probably going to think we’re up to no good. Especially now he knows I work for Vertex.”

He’d succeeded in halting my tears—that was the single silver lining to the enormous black cloud that had taken over our tiny tin box.

“George, what did you do?”

30

ELIZABETH

George looked at the ceiling. After a weighty pause, he let out a wry chuckle. “It won’t surprise you to hear that getting kicked out of Harper Adams kind of screwed my prospects. They gave me my bachelor’s in the end, but I never got the master’s, so it was hard to find decent work.”

“I thought you were going to switch to law.”