mean he needed to write me off, too.”
But again, despite the words she used, Atlas was certain he saw a hint of something else on her face. As if she wasn’t as meekly grateful and humbly subservient as she acted.
“Because your uncle is nothing if not emotional,” he said derisively, hoping that might tease Lexi’s real thoughts out. “Family first, that’s what he’s known for.”
She flushed at his harshly ironic tone. “He’s a little reserved, yes, but—”
“Your uncle never had the power to disown your mother, Lexi,” Atlas said, and even though he’d been leading up to this from the start, since before he’d stepped outside his cell, he made himself sound impatient. Gruff and dark, because he knew it got to her.
And so it did. She squirmed.
“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” he asked when she made no reply. “You are as much a Worth family heiress as Philippa was. All your mother’s money was held from her and is now yours. With interest.”
“That’s not possible,” she said, almost dully. Almost as if she couldn’t entirely process what he was saying.
“Of course, because your mother was such a disaster, there’s a little clause in your trust. If your uncle does not approve of the man you marry, you will never see a penny of your fortune. And if you never marry, he will continue to handle that fortune as he sees fit, lest you be drawn into a marriage like your parents’ at some point in the future.”
“My...” She shook her head, her gaze blank. He thought perhaps she was shocked. “I don’t have a fortune.”
“But you see, you do. You always have.” Atlas reached over and took her chin in his fingers before he knew he meant to move at all, much less touch her. He told himself the bolt of sensation that seared through him at so innocuous a touch was about his years in prison, not her. He needed a woman. Any woman. He told himself it had nothing to do with this woman, particularly. But he also didn’t let go. “And I want it.”
“You want...?”
“You, Lexi.” Atlas smiled. Not at all nicely. “I want you. When your uncle asks what else he can give me, that is what I will tell him. That I intend to marry you. And that he will give his enthusiastic blessing to the match or live to regret it.”
“None of this... I’m not...” Her chin trembled in his grip. “He won’t do that. For any number of reasons.”
“He will,” Atlas said, stone and certainty, and furious all the way through. “Because if he does not, I will burn this place, and this family, straight down to the ground, Lexi. And better yet—I’ll enjoy it.”
LEXI WAS THE only one who had not dressed for dinner, which had the immediate effect of making her feel like a scullery maid. She tried to suck that in and bury it beneath her usual unflappably serene expression—the one she’d practiced in the mirror for years when she was younger—but as she stood in the family drawing room before dinner in her wilted office clothes while all around her swanned her cousins in the typical Worth family finery, she found it grated.
Or maybe it was that everything grated, suddenly, and her clothes were just a symptom.
She had no idea where the rest of her afternoon had gone.
Atlas had left the carriage house and she’d stood where he left her for a long, long time, as if she’d forgotten how to move. At some point she remembered, because she’d moved to the window near the polished stones she’d collected during the one beach holiday her parents had ever taken her on, and that was where she found herself as twilight began to fall over the estate. It was like a fugue state, and it left her no time to return to her flat, change into one of her few more formal dresses and then get back in time for dinner.
Maybe there was a part of her that had wanted it that way, she’d thought as she’d walked the twenty minutes across the park toward the manor house. Maybe something in her wanted to walk into one of Worth Manor’s famous formal dinners dressed like an office drone, every inch of her the obviously poor relation she’d been to these people since Uncle Richard had come to collect her at eight years old.
Except...if what Atlas had said to her was true, she’d never been the poor relation at all.
Did they all know it? Were they all a part of this, or did they all believe the same story Lexi always had?
Lexi couldn’t let herself think about it too closely. It was too much to pile on top of the lingering effects of Philippa’s murder and the greater worry of Atlas’s return. The fact that Atlas had gotten out of prison in the first place felt like entirely too much to handle, if she was honest. Much less that he’d come straight for her. The things he’d thrown out so cavalierly, as if they were simple little facts like the color of the walls instead of literally life-altering—well. How could she possibly process any of that? It was too much. He was too much.
Not to mention the things he’d said to her. Much less threatened.
“What are you doing here?” her cousin Harry asked her when she settled herself on the farthest settee in the drawing room, where she’d assumed she was least likely to attract notice or offend anyone with her presence. He was a tad too provoking for her tastes, but that was Harry. Red of face and shockingly ginger of hair, but nothing so attractive as the redheaded prince who shared his name. This Harry was always drunk and bitter. “Do you have something for Father to sign?”
And Lexi felt it then. That twisted, tangled, knotted thing inside her that she’d worked so hard all these years to ignore. To keep tucked away so nobody could possibly suspect it was lurking in there, the dark and forever angry little part of her that had always found the compulsory gratitude that was expected of her a little too hard to produce on cue.
Especially when she was treated like the lowliest member of the staff instead of family.
“I was invited,” she said, perhaps more coldly than necessary.
She didn’t say by whom. If Harry was surprised by that, or her chilly tone, he buried it in his back-to-back pre-dinner cocktails the way he always did. And by the time the whole of the family was gathered in the drawing room, Harry was well on his way to being entirely drunk. And the reckless way he ran his mouth when intoxicated was far more interesting to concentrate on than the reason everyone was standing there, speaking to each other in quietly appalled, obviously anxious tones.
As if that would make any difference. As if the quietness would save them, somehow, when Lexi felt certain that Atlas wouldn’t care if they screamed and shouted. In fact, he might prefer it that way.
He, of course, was late.
“You’d think the one thing a person might learn in prison was how to be on time,” her cousin Gerard muttered. His wife, the self-satisfied Lady Susan—who never missed an opportunity to flaunt the fact that she was both titled and had provided Gerard with an heir and two spares to cement her position in the family forever—tittered.
Lexi stayed where she was, on the settee tucked beneath the far window. She felt different, somehow, than she normally did when she found herself in the middle of the Worth family.
