Page 104 of In With a Chance

“I just said that,” snapped Gwen, nerves raw. It was only then that an idea struck her. “But you know, don’t you?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment,” said her brother cheerfully.

Gwen narrowed her eyes. It was all the confirmation she needed. “Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Michael!”

“Oh, Gwen, can’t you just let him go?” said her brother, the traitor, sighing. “He said very unfair things to you, did he not?”

‘Let’… ‘Let him go’?

Gwen’s heart, her very soul rebelled against the idea. Let the man go? The man she loved, with whom she had shared so much? The only man in the world with whom she had truly been honest?

She had given up the Marquess of Ravenshurst for him!

And obviously, now that she had more information, she could see that a marriage between herself and the marquess would never have worked…but she had not known that at the time, had she?

Gwen sighed, leaning back against the timber frame. “I cannot let him go. I need to know where he is, Michael, and if you know—”

“And what if he doesn’t want you to know?”

His statement stopped her voice, her words ending on a croak as she stared at Michael.

Ernest doesn’t…want me to know?

The idea had never occurred to her. Of course Ernest wanted her to know; he loved her. That was what he had said, though his following actions—after he had taken her virtue—had very much suggested that he did not love her.

Her stomach lurched most uncomfortably, roiling in nausea as the ship… Well. Mostly stayed exactly where it was.

Her thoughts whirled, scattering through her mind like the wind. She needed him, ached for him in a way beyond physicality. The tremors of her pain were subsiding as her mind thought about Ernest, and warmth spread through her at the very memory of him.

“But I love him,” Gwen said before she could stop herself. “Being without him… It’s like being without an arm, without my own thoughts. It’s empty, the world, because he’s not here observing it with me. I need him, Michael.”

Bother. She hated being so vulnerable with her brother. It was infuriating!

“You love him, then, do you?” asked her brother quietly. “Even though he was unkind?”

Gwen blinked back tears. “Michael, I… I have never known anything like it. It’s as though I were created only for him, to know him and love him, and now without him, not only do I have no purpose, I cannot hear music in the same way, I cannot breathe, I cannot—you’re grinning.”

That was never a good sign.

“You’re grinning,” she repeated, her suspicions truly raised now. “Michael, why are you grinning?”

“See, I told you,” said Michael to no one in particular.

Gwen narrowed her eyes and glanced about them, seeing no one but her family and Phylis’s crew. “What do you mean, you told—”

“Gwen.”

It was not Michael who spoke her name. It was another man, a man whose voice was so precious and familiar to her that she could easily pick it out through the rabble of noise on the Dreamer’s deck.

The doorway between her and Michael had opened. Standing there, in the doorframe…was Ernest.

“I told you,” Michael said proudly. “I knew I’d be able to get her to—”

“Go away, Michael!”