#iaw polin snippet

[indiaalphawhiskey]

🪞A teeny Polin Snippet🪞

And then there was this iteration of Penelope – the one whose once-easy laughter he now had to work for. If he had thought her clever before, it was nothing in comparison to seeing her stripped of that last little bit of softness for him; always en guard and ready to parry at any hint of an opening, this version was sharper, more sarcastic and, frankly, a little bit sexy.

The thought sent a jolt through him. Did he think Penelope Featherington was sexy?

Surely not, he thought with a frown.

She was attractive, of course she was; he’d realized as much sometime around their university days. Something about being away from home, from her mother, from the suffocatingly small society circle they’d both been born into changed something in the way she carried herself and made her more at ease, which may, in turn, have led to a literal drove of other men taking notice. (Eloise had once boasted to Colin that the sheer volume of free shots they’d received the summer Penelope had gone blonde nearly led to repeated bouts of alcohol poisoning.) (Colin much preferred her as a redhead.)

Sexy, though?

He supposed she was, in an esoteric kind of way – sexy as a higher concept, if one would – the same way the Birth of Venus was sexy.

(Was the Birth of Venus sexy? Yes, he decided. A keep-at-arms-length, admired-from-behind-a-velvet-rope, absolutely-no-danger-of-falling-into-bed-together sexy. Platonically sexy. Why couldn’t he stop saying the word ‘sexy’?)

Their cheese platter arrived with enough pomp and circumstance around it to derail his thoughts before he could think himself straight into a concussion. (Thank god.)

[indiaalphawhiskey]

“Perhaps,” Colin said, and the word itself tasted so bitter on his tongue, it was as though he was compelled into spitting all the others out of his mouth, just to finally rid himself of the poison of them, “that was another part of your… entrapment.”

His regret was instant — hot and blinding — his mind playing out the memory of her wide, curious, shining eyes as she had laid bare and vulnerable beneath him, all bashful innocence, and asked him, so earnestly, ‘Is there more?’

The sweet lilt of it echoed in his head as his pitiful lie burned through his body, shaming him. But he could not bring himself to look at her now, because he knew he could not take the accusation back — knew no apology would suffice.

“I did not mean to entrap you, Colin.” Her gentle words were pained — small, and tearful, and so full of truth. “I love you.”

Out of his periphery, he caught the shape of her lips as she said it, sweetly downturned in their devastation, in their distress.

He loved those lips.

He loved her. His Pen.

It was on the tip of his tongue, his heart steadfastly pushing it forward like a boulder through a dark cave, desperately urging the confession out of him. Only—

“I loved you enough to save you from entrapment,” she said. And maybe, had he not been so focused on the way the earlier devastation in her voice seemed to turn determined, he would have seen it sooner: seen her slip off her ring before her warm fingers met his — the touch he had so missed, had so agonizingly craved for days, finally coming back to him in its most heart wrenching iteration. She pressed the cold metal into the palm of his clenched hand, the curves of the small pearls smooth against his skin. It might as well have been shards of broken glass.

“I love you enough,” she repeated, though it was not lost on him, the sudden change of tense — from past to present, “to save you from entrapment.”

His gaze shot to her the very moment the true meaning of her words hit him, dread solidifying at the bottom of his belly.

No, he thought, panicked.

No.

No.

No!

Again, the right words had failed him. She was gone.