Seven Wicked Nights by Courtney Milan Page A

ruined. Oh, it wouldn’t herald a complete end to her good reputation. Evan wouldn’t let anything so dire happen. They would marry.
    Still, when she shut her eyes, it was not her reputation that she thought of, but the expression on his face when she’d accused him of telling Lady Cosgrove. Never mind the impossibility of her accusation. It didn’t matter that she’d been tired and the woman had seemed to threaten her newfound happiness. With those thoughtless words, she’d banished the relaxed trust she’d seen earlier that night. His eyes had gone wide with hurt and the tips of his ears had turned white. She could hear the pained gasp he’d given. And the look on his face, when she’d assumed that he had spoken of her—it had skewered her through.
    Of course he’d been hurt by her words. Her first panicking impulse had been to shy away from
him
. After everything he’d said and done, she still hadn’t trusted him.
    She knew what Evan wanted from her. Not mere desire, not just friendship. He’d said it himself: he wanted someone who would hold onto him and never let go. But at the first sign of danger, she had shoved him away.
    Her hand clenched around the note in her hand. The paper crackled. Elaine sighed and unfolded it.
    Elaine
, the note read.
Don’t worry about Diana. I’ll manage her. It may take some time, though—I might not be over this afternoon to speak with your father, as we’d discussed. Perhaps we shall see one another at the ball this evening. Yours, W.
    So formal. After last night, his note seemed stiff and impossible. And how was he to
manage
Lady Cosgrove? For God’s sake, the woman lived across the street. He would come and talk to her and not visit with Elaine? Not even stop by for fifteen minutes?
    She bit her lip hard and thought of what she ought to say to him, how she should respond. She had a sudden vision of her turning pointedly away from him that evening. And wouldn’t
that
occasion talk, after their months of cozy friendship? The whole situation made her want to weep.
    She was tired. She was overset. And she was imagining a life without him over a note that he’d dashed off in a hurry.
    “It’s nothing,” she said to herself.
    But it wasn’t nothing. After all these years, she was still waiting for him to hurt her. She’d not thought of it in months, but she’d been holding on to the pain of her past, always expecting the worst.
    He’d hurt her. He’d made her feel awful.
    But he hadn’t plunged her head underwater. She’d done that to herself.
    And if she continued to flinch at every good thing that came her way, she would do it again and again and again, drowning everything she could have. He’d known it too. She didn’t need to forgive
him
. She needed…
    “Enough of this.” She spoke the words aloud, slicing her hand through the air as she spoke.
    “My lady?”
    Elaine glanced behind her in surprise. Mary was still waiting behind her, stifling a yawn.
    When Elaine had been hurt in the past, she had retreated inside herself. It was time to make a change.
    “Mary,” Elaine said, clambering to her feet, “we have only a few hours, and I’m going to need a new gown.”

    E VAN WAS TRAPPED BY PILLOWS . The afternoon sun filtered through his cousin’s sitting room. The room was papered in resplendent gold and green; Evan felt rather out of place in his sober brown. A profusion of tiny cushions, embroidered in cunning patterns, flocked about him. If he moved, he would knock them to the floor.
    Diana sat opposite him. They’d exchanged only the most inconclusive of greetings. She’d ushered him into the room and had rung for tea, and they’d sat in awkward silence until the tray arrived. Only the faint lines gathered about her mouth suggested her distress.
    She had scarcely spoken with him since that evening at the house party last summer. She had informed him at a family gathering in the autumn that he would soon come to his senses. Two weeks later,