“Conrad...” Jenny began, pushing out from behind Dylan’s shoulder.
And everything in him demanded that he pull her back. That he handle this. That he do whatever he needed to do—beat his chest, roar. Come over like the raging Neanderthal creature he’d always been, just there beneath his skin.
Heachedwith the need to beat Conrad back, using whatever means necessary to get him away from Jenny.
But no matter what happened here, he knew where this would end. Where it was always going to end.
“If you don’t mind,” Conrad said, with such scrupulous politeness that it made Jenny flinch and Dylan want to break things—more things—“I’d like to have a word with my future wife.”
Jenny took a deep breath, and Dylan could see what she was about to do written all over her face.
And he was the best friend she would ever have. He loved her more than he would ever love anything in this life or the next. Dylan knew that, because, instead of standing there between Jenny and her future, he stepped aside.
Literally.
“Of course,” he said.
He nodded at Conrad as if they were exchanging business cards. He forced himself to look at Jenny, and it was worse than he’d expected. She was staring at him, shock and betrayal on her face, because she already knew what he was doing. That was the trouble with all this friendship shit. There was no goddamn mystery, and that was one more thing he was going to make certain to beat out of himself as he got home.
He nodded at her, too. “Take care, Jenny.”
Dylan thought he heard her say his name, but he made himself walk away. He imagined them retreating back into texts as the weeks went by. There would be fewer and fewer of those as time went on, he imagined. It would be easier to forget. To pretend. To head back to England and plan her wedding, the way she should have been doing all along. She would invite him, no doubt, and he would go and smile and toast her happiness, because that was what friends did. And in a handful of years it would be like none of this had ever happened. He would be nothing more to her than an old school friend she saw rarely, if at all.
He figured he was already more or less a memory by the time he pushed through the doors, back out into a bright, cold Sydney morning.
And there was nothing he could do about his heart. He’d lost that too long ago now to imagine he’d ever get it back.
But he was a proud Irish man, a saint and a scholar through and through, and well did he know the cure for a spot of heartache. If not for what ailed him, then for what he was going to have to live through now that it was done.
It was finally done.
And Dylan might not find what he was looking for in the bottom of a bottle, but he planned to do a whole lot of asking anyway.
Until what hurt was his head—not that gaping, empty hole where his heart hadn’t been since Jenny had claimed it with a happy laugh when they were both eighteen.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CONRADORDEREDTEA.
On the list of things that were epically wrong with this moment, this engagement of hers and her entire life, Jenny had to place that at the very top.
The world was ending and Conrad orderedtea. As if he was a proper Englishman when she was the one with the British title and the bloodline to match.
And the wordproperkicked around inside of her, spiked and mean, until she felt more or less bloodied, inside and out.
The tea service arrived, and Jenny had been entirely too well taught to sit back listlessly. Or to slump over and wail, the way she had half a mind to do. So she busied herself pouring out steaming cups, asking muted questions about sugar and cream and then sitting there in the little study Conrad had led her to, staring across a fine antique table at this man there was no possible way she could marry.
He gazed back at her with absolutely no expression on his face.
Clinically speaking, he was a handsome man. Jenny knew that, even if she didn’tfeelthe way a prospective wife likely should. Erika had spent the whole of their friendship moaning about how cold her brother was, how cruel, but Jenny had never seen any of that herself. He was simply...expressionless, always.
But what she hadn’t understood until now was that he had never truly focused all of his attention on her before.
It was...intense. Something very nearly alarming.
The full force of his attention made her want to squirm. But she didn’t.
“This is very awkward,” she said instead, because it seemed better to say it than to continue to sit there in silence.