"Perhaps."
"I used to think you were the affable one, Tor."
"I am what I am." Tor could still use charm to good effect, but felt less inclined to do so as he got older.
The more people who tried to take advantage of him and his position, like Lisette, the more cynical he became.
"Oh man, I don't know how either of your brothers doesn't see you're every bit as emotionally repressed, not to mention as arrogant as they are."
"You believe your husband is repressed?" Tor said nothing about the arrogance. It was a family trait. Full stop.
"He was when we got married."
"Not so much anymore?" Tor asked, thinking he'd noticed a change in his brother but wanting confirmation.
After all, they were no longer close as they'd been when he was young. He could not claim to know Holger best and vice-versa.
Janne gave a knowing smile and then frowned. "I didn't come looking to talk about that either."
Tor just waited in silence for his sister-in-law to get to the point.
"There was a time you would have badgered me to know what I wanted to talk to you about," she said musingly.
They'd met many years ago, before Holger had taken on the role of Monarch and sent Tor to boarding school in America. Tor had still been an irrepressible teenager and hadn't yet been pushed entirely to the fringes of his family's lives.
"We all change," he said mildly.
"Yes, we do." Janne bit her lip, looking at him with concern. "I see the way you look at Blythe."
Tor just raised his brow, giving nothing away.
"You want her."
"If that is true, it is certainly between Miss Whitney-Jones and myself." Want her? He craved Blythe. Maybe even needed her, but what he felt for his clandestine lover was no one's business but his own.
Not even Blythe's. Not as long as she was insisting on their secret friends with benefits agreement, and refusing to acknowledge the label of lover.
"She's too old for you, Tor."
Janne's words surprised him. Coming from anyone else, even Blythe, they weren't as shocking.
But not only were he and Janne friends, she'd always treated him as an equal. And there was her own situation of course, married to his brother.
"You mean like my brother is too old for you?" he asked sardonically.
Holger was seven years Janne's senior. Blythe was eight years older than Tor; that single additional year made no difference to the circumstance.
"It's not the—"
"If you say, the same," he interrupted. "I will seriously question your professed commitment to equality between the sexes."
Janne's mouth snapped shut.
When she added nothing more, Tor informed her, "In the context you are implying, the age difference between myself and Miss Whitney-Jones is entirely irrelevant. As is whatever you think you know about any attraction I might have for her."
"How can you say that?"
"I can say it because it is the truth. You are my sister-in-law. More importantly, you are one of the few people I consider a friend, but my life is still my own, Janne, and has been for a very long time."