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“Are you going to call off the wedding?”
A jolt of pain goes through Penelope’s heart as she vocalizes the words she has been wondering for days now.
Colin is right in saying that they were drawing curious glances from their families after not seeing each other, but when she had heard he would be with them today, she had hoped. Hoped that he had just needed time away to digest, to think, to understand. When Lady Bridgerton and Colin greeted them at the door, however, Penelope knew from the look on his face that he had not actually calmed.
She looks at him now, waiting for him to simply look at her, but he does not. He stares ahead and tells her, “I am a man of honor.” Her heart clenches painfully. “And we were… intimate.” She feels her eyes well with tears that can’t fall. Not until—“Perhaps that was another part of your planned entrapment.”
Oh .
She feels another flash of pain, but this time, it doesn’t only hurt. It burns . She swallows down against the hot coals making their way up her throat and glances over to their mothers. They’re enraptured in the delight of planning Penelope and Colin’s wedding breakfast, and merely a week ago it would have been everything that Penelope could have dreamed of.
But with Colin’s words, accusation of entrapment, it was everything she… she simply refused, now. She would not be stuck in a marriage where her husband believes he is trapped . She had never expected to marry for love, all she has ever expected is mutual contentment and respect. And she sees neither here.
She feels sick.
“Very well,” she says, and finally Colin looks at her, but she doesn’t spare him a glance. She doesn’t want to see the anger or hurt in his expression. Instead, she glances to their mothers. “Mama,” she calls. Lady Bridgerton and her mother pause in their conversation and look over. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but there will no longer be a wedding.”
“ What? ” three voice spit out. Two with shock and confusion, one with… she doesn’t even want to decipher Colin’s tone.
She turns to him but does not meet his eye. She curtsies. “I release you,” she says, her voice shaking.
“Pen—” Colin demands, stepping forward. She steps back.
“I truly hope you may find what you are looking for one day. I’m sorry that it could not be me.” She slips the ring off her finger and holds it out to him. He doesn’t move to take it.
“What is going on? ” Lady Bridgerton demands.
“Give us a moment,” Colin says, and reaches out for Penelope. Offers his hand for her to take. The first offer of physical contact since the night he found our. She blinks. Drops the ring in it. She’s out the door before Colin has even processed what has happened.
“ Pen! ” Colin yells, chasing after her. She’d gotten quite the head start, but his legs are much longer than hers, so by the time she reaches her room, he’s able to get a hand on the door before she can slam it shut.
“Colin—” She starts, backing into the room to get away from him.
“ What the hell was that? ”
Penelope gulps, feeling the heat in her throat again. A unique blend of shame and anger that she feels rolling in her gut. “I would like you to leave,” she whispers, refusing to look at him.
“Excuse me?”
“We are no longer betrothed, and propriety states—”
Colin laughs, breathless and disbelieving. “You’re not serious.”
Finally, she lifts her eyes to his. “Quite.”
“I will not,” he snaps.
“You will ,” she returns. “Or I will.”
“ You will not.”
“ What do you want from me?” she cries shrilly. “I have released you from our betrothal. If you so desire, you may tell the ton it was your choice so you do not sully your prospects—”
“ Sully my prospects? ”
She glares up at him. There’s a look of disbelief on his face, covering something that looks astoundingly like hurt . The shame disappears from her gut and she’s left with nothing but anger, raging in an uncontrollable inferno. “Perhaps you can find a prospect for once who will not entrap you,” she snarls. “Now I have asked you to leave—”
“ You do not get to—”
“I get to do what I please!” she snaps. This time, she steps closer to him, even though she has to tilt her head to see him now.
“We are to be married .”
“We were to be married,” she reminds him, narrowing her eyes. “I do not wish to live the rest of my days pouring my heart into a marriage where my husband feels trapped .”
Colin steps forward so that they are chest to chest. It kills her to keep her hands by her sides and not reach out to hold him when he is distressed, but she does not think he would want her to. In fact, she does not think that she wants to.
“I love you, Colin. And if this is not what you want, I will not go through with it.”
Colin’s jaw clenches and she can see the shoulders of his jacket shift as his arms move, balling his hands into fists. “You do not,” he says.
“What?”
“You do not love me.”
Penelope can do nothing but gape at him, unable to form a reply , let alone a thought . She stares. Finally, she manages to get out, “Excuse me?”
“You cannot love me,” Colin continues, “and certainly not in the way that I love you.”
“ Colin —”
“You have targeted me, you have targeted my family—”
“I have done what needed to be done,” Penelope cuts him off. “Could I have done things a different way, yes —”
“Then why didn’t you?”
She glares up at him. “Because I’m not infallible! I make mistakes, I say the wrong thing, I do the wrong thing. I know this! Do you think I could have gone years like this with out knowing?” She turns and strides across the room, standing over her Whistledown hiding spot, as if it will give her power. Whistledown is power, afterall. “The mistakes I’ve made have been hard , Colin! But all of them begin with the right intentions. All of them come from a place of love. And all of them have destroyed me. And I will not allow myself to make another. To… trap you when all I want—all I need —is your happiness.
“And on that journey to your happiness, I have overlooked your mistakes. Overlooked hurt you caused. Overlooked the chinks in the armor that you had worn in my mind’s eye as the perfect man . I have seen you , and I have loved you . So perhaps I do not love you as you love me. But neither do you love me as I love you .”
Colin steps toward her. “ How can I, Pen?” he whispers, his voice cracking on his words. “How can I see you if you do not allow me to?”
“Look at me now ,” she says. “But do not look at me as two people. Lady Whistledown is who I am. We are not separate. You cannot have one or the other.”
“But Lady Whistledown—”
“ Me , Colin.”
He averts his gaze. “But you are…”
“What am I?” she presses.
His jaw clenches and he grinds out, “You have hurt people.”
“Do you think I have enjoyed doing so?”
Colin flicks his eyes to her quickly, and then to the window. He does not answer.
“No,” she says, walking forward until she stops in front of him. She takes his hand, grateful when he does not protest. “No, Colin. Look at me.” It takes several seconds, but he does. “You know me,” she murmurs. “You have always known me. So tell me, do you think I have enjoyed the hurt I’ve caused?”
“Then why did you?” he asks, and the question is an answer in itself. He knows that she did not enjoy it, but he also can’t reconcile that part of her with the part of her that did it .
“For many, many reasons,” she tells him. “But most of the time it came down to… to protecting those who needed it.” She drops his hand, but he immediately reaches out to scoop hers back up. She suppresses a smile as she gazes up at him. “After all is said and done… I hope I have grown from my experiences and will be more intelligant with the roads I take in the future. But I do not regret my actions. Not when I felt I had no other at the time.”
“Is that what you felt downstairs?” Colin asks. “That you had no other options but to break our betrothal?”
Penelope squeezes his hand. “I told you, Colin. I do not want this if it will not make you happy.”
Colin purses his lips. He looks out the window again, but before she can step away, he’s tugging her closer. “I do not think you entraped me,” he admits, turning to meet her eyes. “I… I was angry. I am angry.” He lifts his free hand to caress her face as he thinks over his next words. “But I do not wish to lose you. Pen, my heart could not take it.”
“I will always be your friend, Colin,” she promises.
“I do not want you as my friend. I do not want you as anything less than my wife.”
She studies him. “Colin,” she says after a long moment.
He places two fingers beneath her chin and lifts her face until she couldn’t avoid his eyes even if she were trying. “What?”
“I need you to be sure.”
Colin leans down, pressing his lips to hers firmly. “Pen, I am sure,” he promises. “I am angry, yes, but my anger will pass, fade, be forgotten. My love for you, however, will continue to grow until there is no room in my chest for air, no space in my mind for thoughts. I am in love with you and, even through my anger and my hurt, my love cannot be eclipsed.”
“What of Whistledown?”
Colin looks at Penelope, his eyes gentle and curious, and before he says anything, she knows it will be alright. “What of you?”
She smiles at his words, but raises a hand to lay on his chest. “I need to know this isn’t going to hang over our heads for the rest of our lives, Colin.”
“We… need to talk,” he says. She nods. “There is much to discuss and figure out. However,” he says, “I would much rather return to our mamas to alert them that there will absolutely still be a wedding.”
Penelope presses on to her toes, reaching for a kiss. Colin grants it to her, drawing it out by parting his lips beneath hers and deepening it in a way that they should not be doing when their mothers are downstairs. She finds that she doesn’t quite care.
After a minute, they break apart. With her eyes still closed, she tells him, “I do love you. I always have. I always will.”
She feels him exhale against her lips. “I love you,” he says back. “I’m sorry I doubted you and your intentions.”
She peeks at him through her eyelids. “I’m sorry I gave you a reason to doubt.”
Colin hums. His eyes open and find hers. “We will talk before the wedding. So that we both may go in with eyes wide open.”
“Of course,” she agrees.
He presses one last kiss to her lips. “Let us return to our mothers so that we may share the good news. Again .”
Colin offers Penelope his arm and she folds hers through his as they make their way back.