A Midsummer Night's Kiss (Howertys #1)

Chapter 38: Just Hold On

Dear Diary,
I remember meeting Philip once when I was
a child. He wasn't a very pleasant boy even
then. I don't know why I thought he'd change.

Angel watched the shadowy landscape pass by the carriage window as they travelled through the darkness in the late summer evening. Tentatively flexing her hands resting in her lap, she felt the ropes cutting into the skin of her wrists and grimaced. At least her feet weren't bound. Not that it made much difference.

Resigned to her current circumstances, she turned her head to give her travelling companions a cold look. No one had spoken since she'd been unceremoniously tossed into the vehicle to discover that Philip wasn't alone. After climbing in behind her and rapping at the ceiling to make the driver set the carriage in motion, her captor sat down on the bench next to his accomplice. Angel had to scramble up on the opposite bench with no aid, a feat that had not been the easiest in a moving carriage with her hands bound.

"I must admit to being surprised to see you," she said coldly, tired of the eerie quietness. "That Philip would want revenge doesn't surprise me, but I never expected to find you here. But then you always played dirty. What's in this for you?"

Joan's blue eyes flashed angrily as she regarded her. "You always did underestimate me," she sneered. "Perfect little Angel, never doing anything wrong. Always the one with the biggest room and the prettiest toys. Everyone catered to you because you're the viscount's sister."

That was hardly an answer to her question, but Angel didn't argue. It was clear their memories of their life growing up together were wildly different. She may have had the biggest room, but only because she already lived there when Joan and her parents moved in. Had they been able to shift Angel into another one without James noticing, she had no doubts they would have. Her cousin sounded jealous... But of what? Aunt Christine certainly had found fault with plenty of things in their time together. Enough to make Angel doubt her own worth and consider marrying a man like Philip.

But she was no longer that scared girl who bowed under her aunt's oppressive comments. Nathaniel and his family—even James—had helped her find her voice. To stand up for herself and her own wants. She would cower no longer.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked. "You've always disliked me, but to commit a crime... It is a step further than I would have considered."

"The marquess should have been mine!" Joan snapped. With a frustrated toss of her dark hair, which was loose and spilling down her shoulders, she continued, "I don't know what you did to make him marry you. Seduce him, I suppose. But it should have been me."

Angel could do little but stare. Joan had always coveted anything Angel had, and had resented any time she could not have the same—or better yet, take Angel's. But this was a human being they were talking about. Her husband.

"Nathaniel showed no interest in you," she said, trying to keep her tone calm and reasonable.

"He did." Joan shook her head, unwilling to consider otherwise. "You're lying. He was ever so polite any time I sought him out, and I just know he would have been mine if you had not interfered. You always take everything from me."

"What?" Angel glanced at Philip to see if he would help her make Joan see reason, but he sat quietly with his arms crossed, his cold eyes disinterested in their conversation. Frustrated, she turned back to her cousin. "Joan, I have never taken anything from you."

"You stole my parents! Then the man I intended to marry. And you already had one lined up!" Joan's arm flung out to indicate Philip, hitting him in the chest and eliciting a grunt. "Why would you discard a perfectly suitable match for you if not to take something I wanted out of spite?"