Instead, she only wanted him.
“It’s good that you admit it,” he said casually. “But as I said, there are always two choices involved. And I won’t be your guillotine. Regardless of what happened to Richard.”
The words chilled her. She did not understand them, but she recognized their power. They raised a wall that would take an axe to break down. “What happened to Richard has nothing to do with this.”
“And yet we’ve never spoken of it,” he said. “An absence so pointed is not an absence at all.”
She drew her knees up into her chest. “I have . . . no wish to die, if that’s what you mean. This is not some grand, reckless, suicidal lark on my part.”
“I don’t think he meant his to be, either.”
Silence. “He was . . . angry with you,” she said finally. “I know.”
“I could have stopped him,” he said. “So easily.”
The rawness in his voice jarred her. “Alex—do you think I blame you for his death? I have never done so. Not once.”
The corner of his mouth tipped up. He sat back into the shadows, his expression lost to her. “Not once,” he echoed.
The mocking emphasis filled the air between them longer than she should have allowed. But she knew a challenge when she heard one—and also that old habits were so hard to shake, while new skills took time to sharpen. She did not want to be clumsy in her honesty.
“Perhaps,” she began carefully, “in the early days, when he had just . . . left us—”
“Been murdered,” he said emotionlessly. “He did not leave us, Gwen. He was violently taken. It is an important distinction: it means there is blame to be apportioned.”
“All right,” she said softly. “After he was murdered . . . I did think, once or twice, that it was you who taught him to play such games—that it was your path he had followed to the grave.”
There. That was the cruelest part, and it was spoken, now.
By a fierce act of will, she restrained herself from rushing onward.
He, in turn, sat impassively, watching her from the dark.
She stared back into his featureless face. She did not need the light; she knew what she was looking at. Chestnut hair, ice blue eyes, broad cheekbones over gaunt cheeks, a strong jaw and high-bridged nose: he was the picture of rugged good looks, and girls did sigh over him, in secret, when their mothers were not listening.
For herself, she had always, usually reluctantly, admired his more intangible qualities—foremost, his unshakable composure.
It was rather unnerving now to be faced with the full force of that composure. He had asked the question; surely he owed her some reaction to the answer.
As the silence extended, his impassivity, his unfair use of the darkness, roused a small strain of resentment in her—just enough to remind her of exactly what she had thought, in those weeks after Richard’s death. After his murder.
“At the funeral, you were so cold,” she said. So composed. It had unnerved her. Unnerved and angered her, too. She had lost the last person remaining to her, but he still had so many people to love him, for all that he took them for granted, rebuffing their every sign of care.
“I was in shock,” he said evenly.
“Yes.” That had been her later conclusion. But at the time, locked in her own shock, she had thought that maybe it was not composure so much as inhumanity that aided him—in which case, people would do better to admire him as they might a tiger at the zoo: from a distance, with no ambitions.
She did not believe that now. She saw him more clearly.
“Here’s something,” she said quietly. “I thought to myself that you put a spell on people—inadvertently, of course. Sometimes I still think it. Your wit and charm seem so careless—almost accidental, really. You’re so at ease in the world, Alex. And I think, because you make it look so easy, that people think they can emulate you—can seize life by the throat as you do. But it requires skill to skirt the risks you run. And my brother never had that talent. He was not . . . watchful enough.” She paused. “But I am.”
He made a soft noise, of skepticism or scorn.
“I am,” she said more sharply. “I am not my brother. And I knew my brother as well as you did, mind you. When I say you charmed him, that does not mean you were somehow to blame.” By befriending Richard, Alex had only done what her parents had hoped for. They had wanted Richard to learn to see the world from a particular vantage point: how to make the sort of assumptions, and to demand the sort of entitlements, and to formulate the sort of expectations, that any gentleman of the upper class did. How to gamble, how to drink, how to cut a stylish path through the Continent—why else had her parents sent Richard to Rugby?