Dangerous Alliance: An Austentacious Romance by Cohen Jennieke

Author:Cohen, Jennieke [Cohen, Jennieke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Romance, Young Adult, Mystery
ISBN: 9780062857309
Amazon: 0062857304
Goodreads: 44244324
Publisher: HarperTeen
Published: 2019-12-03T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter the Fifteenth

“But what,” said she, after a pause, “can have been his motive?”

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

As Tom strode down the street toward Vicky’s town house, he resisted the urge to walk faster. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was actually looking forward to seeing her again. Last night at the musicale, he’d thought he only wanted to call on her to tell her what Dain and Carmichael had said. Now he wondered.

She was still so like the girl he remembered from their childhood—the Vicky who always urged her horse to jump ridiculously tall hedges or snuck into the Oakbridge kitchens to pilfer enough strawberry tarts to make herself ill.

He’d done his best to forget such images. They only caused a dull ache somewhere in his chest. But yesterday when they’d reminisced about the day she’d lost her boot in the stream, he’d felt—comforted.

Before he’d left for Eton as a boy, he and Vicky had rarely been out of each other’s company. When they were even younger, Charles and Althea had often tried to tag along, but they’d always given up. He and Vicky had never paid them much attention. They should have been kinder, especially since he and Charles had been forced apart for so many years.

His regrets returned, and with them, his hatred for his father. Tom’s mind swirled with images: playing soldiers on the staircase with Charles and the old man’s angry glare as he caught them, walloped Tom in the head, and left his ears ringing for the rest of the day; his father yanking his mother’s arm and throwing her against an armoire as he shouted at her over an imagined slight; Charles’s trembling hands and wide eyes blinking up at Tom as Tom pulled him up the stairs to hide in the nursery while their mother’s muffled screams echoed in his ears. Tom inhaled to dispel the memory of that sound, to drown the shame of never having done enough, and to quiet the rage that always built within him when he remembered.

That rage only brought him closer to becoming his father when all he wanted was to forget him.

When his mother’s letter telling him of his father’s death had reached him, Tom hadn’t shed a tear. To this day, he never had. Instead, he’d let the old tyrant’s demise turn him into a shell of his former self. To some degree, he knew he shouldn’t have let it happen. Yet, the numbness was far preferable to . . . feeling.

Tom rubbed his left temple as he turned the corner onto Kingsford Square. The Astons’ town house stood across the way. A hackney cab waited in front. Tom had erred on the side of propriety and made certain to come during accepted calling hours. He inspected his pocket watch. Four o’clock. Perhaps Vicky was otherwise engaged.

He crossed through the small grassy park in the center of the square and peered into the ground floor windows as he strolled to the front door. People moved quickly through the house.

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