Page 121 of Outrageous

Gabe laughed. “Well, I suppose we should all be grateful you’ve never fallen in unrequited love. I’ll advise everyone to lock their doors, just in case.”

Eva forced herself to laugh, rather than throwing her arms around him and wailing out the truth.

“If it makes you feel any better, Eva, Tommy has felt the same way about you for almost as long. So although you might be dashing one person’s hopes, you’re fulfilling another’s.”

She cut him a dark look. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Because I didn’t want to.” He dodged Eva’s fist this time. “Honestly? I wasn’t quite sure of his feelings for you until you were out of the schoolroom—likely because he knew I would hurt him if he showed any overt intention of taking you as his child bride.” He opened the door to the breakfast room and Eva stopped in the open doorway to stare at the assemblage.

“Look who I brought to join us two-legged creatures,” Gabriel announced to a smattering of laughter.

Eva glanced at her father, who was looking at her apparel—scuffed top boots, scarred leather breeches, and dusty coats—with a pained expression.

Her stepmother laid her hand over the marquess’s and he sighed and turned back to his plate. Mia grinned and winked, and Eva mouthed the words, thank you.

When Eva risked a look at Tommy, she saw he seemed just as displeased as her father.

She also saw that Mel sat beside him, immaculately coiffed and dressed, her adoring gaze riveted on the man who was aiming his own—censorious—gaze at Eva.

Eva stumbled and Gabe had to steady her. “All right, Evil?” he whispered, his expression worried.

Eva couldn’t answer. All she could do was look at the other two sides of this ridiculous triangle she was in. Lord, what a bloody farce. How was it that she, who had always avoided romantic or emotional imbroglios, now seemed to be enmeshed in one?

That hardly matters now, does it?

No, she realized quite suddenly—it didn’t. What mattered was that she figure out a way to extricate herself. And soon.

Chapter 25

With less than two days until the wedding, Eva knew she did not have time to devise the perfect speech—not that she would have been capable of doing so had she been given a hundred years. She knew that the longer she dragged her heels, the worse it would be. Still, she simply could not seem to make herself pull Tommy aside and have The Discussion.

Even she—as oblivious as she was—was not insensible to the embarrassing mess she had created for her family. In forty-eight hours many of her relatives and some of their closest friends would be sitting in the family chapel expecting a wedding; a wedding she simply could not go through with.

Of course, not going through with it meant there was only one choice for her: She would have to confess the truth to her father, and then go away somewhere to have her child. And afterward she would have to turn the baby over to some family to raise—people who would be well paid to treat the child decently, although they might not ever learn to love it. The notion left her feeling empty and ill.

“Bugger and blast and bloody damn,” she hissed under her breath as she strode toward Mia’s apartments. Her stepmother had sent a message down to the stables, and the tenor of it had been such that Eva knew she could not ignore it. So she’d handed over the rest of the day’s duties—not much was left—to James and then went to her room and submitted to her new maid’s attentions.

The poor woman barely spoke as she untangled Eva’s unruly mop, her pensive gaze settling on Eva’s unfashionably sunburnt face—the result of always forgetting a hat—and moving on to her battered and scuffed hands.

Based on the woman’s—Philpot’s—horrified reaction, she wouldn’t be with Eva long.

Eva was now dressed in one of her least vomitous morning gowns and hurrying to arrive at the appointed time, cursing herself all the way that she’d not made the time to speak to Tommy. So now she would have to don the gown Mia would want her to try on, rather than tell her the truth.

Ugh.

She rapped on the door and then entered Mia’s lair.

“Ah! There you are.”

Mia grinned up at her from a settee, where she was reclining with her son, David, and watching her youngest daughter play.

“Eva!” Julia jumped up and thundered across the room with a clumsiness she could not have inherited from either parent, but must have somehow gotten from Eva.

Eva caught her up and spun her around, inadvertently clipping a bronze statue and sending it clattering on the wood flooring. She grimaced and set her half-sister down before turning to face the music.

But Mia was smiling. Of course she was. Eva had never seen her stepmamma angry, and never wanted to.

“And how is young Master David?” Eva asked, peering at her newest sibling, who was snoring softly.