Chapter 3 #2
“We are never alone,” she replied calmly.
The idea unsettled him faintly. The notion that he had once been governed by invisible rules felt foreign.
Since awakening with a fractured memory, he had experienced the world with raw immediacy.
Things either mattered or they did not. Silver placement seemed irrelevant beside the pulse that jumped at the base of his wife’s throat when he looked at her too long.
“I cannot imagine,” he said slowly, “that, in the past, I was so rigid in all matters.”
Her hand stilled around her fork. “In most,” she replied.
He leaned forward slightly. “Surely not in private.”
Her expression sharpened. “There was no private,” she said, voice almost trembling, but she held his gaze steadily. “You left immediately after informing me that your obligation had been fulfilled.”
Something in his chest tightened. He did not remember the version of himself she described. But he did remember the feel of her mouth beneath his, the previous evening. Whatever man he had been, he could not reconcile him with the woman seated before him now.
“You negotiated with my uncle,” she continued. “We met once before the wedding. A formal call. Nothing more.”
He tilted his head to the side. “And you agreed to marry me regardless?”
She paused. “I did not have the luxury of romantic consideration.”
He felt irritation stir at the absent version of himself who had apparently engineered such a situation. The more he considered it, the more the idea displeased him. What sort of man abandoned his wife for a year and expected her to remain politely unchanged?
He held her gaze across the table. “You could have taken a lover.”
Her eyes flashed at once, the hazel brightening with offended heat. “You gave me permission to do so.”
“And did you?” His voice dropped slightly, the calmness in it edged now with something harder.
He leaned forward a fraction, resting one forearm against the table as his gaze searched her face with unsettling intensity.
She did not answer immediately. Instead, she set down her fork and folded her hands neatly in her lap, as though the matter required a moment’s consideration.
The pause scraped against Alexander’s composure.
Something sharp and unwelcome tightened low in his chest. Why the hesitation?
The thought arrived before he could stop it.
Had there been someone? Some gentleman who had stepped conveniently into the vacancy he himself had created?
The notion irritated him in a way he could not quite justify, but it lingered nonetheless, like grit beneath the skin.
He watched her closely, his gaze narrowing slightly. “Well?”
“I did not,” she said at last.
Satisfaction moved through him as he leaned back, the fine linen of his shirt straining against his shoulders. He studied the seriousness of her face, her chocolate-colored hair, her bright, hazel eyes.
“You remained faithful to a man who abandoned you,” he stated.
Diana’s chin lifted, the diamonds at her throat catching the candlelight. “I remained faithful to my name, Your Grace. The reputation of a Duchess is not something I trade for pleasure. Or petty vengeance.”
He watched her carefully then, and all her perfect, rigid composure; the way she held her silver as if it were a weapon; the miles-wide distance she maintained across the table. She was protecting herself from him.
“You believe I will become that man again,” he said, his voice dropping low.
She met his gaze, her hazel eyes clashing with his emerald ones. The honesty in her expression was a physical blow. “Yes. I am waiting for the moment you remember that you despise the suffocating requirements of a wife.”
The bluntness of it startled him, but it only stoked the fire behind his ribs.
“And until then,” she continued, her voice gaining a desperate kind of strength, “it would be prudent for our interactions to remain strictly formal. For your own sake. You will find your footing more easily if we maintain the boundaries of the contract you so highly prized.”
He considered the word. Prudent. It meant distance, detachment. The very qualities she claimed had defined the man who left her.
He shook his head. “I do not believe restraint will restore my memory, Diana. In fact, I suspect it will only serve to keep me a stranger in my own life.”
“Perhaps,” she replied, her fingers ghosting over the stem of her glass. “But it will preserve clarity.”
He didn’t look at her eyes; he studied her mouth as she spoke. He remembered the softness of it from the night before, the way it had yielded, the way it had tasted of wine and surrender just before her pride had forced her to shove him away.
Clarity was the last thing he wanted.
“You may, in fact, be the only remedy I require,” he said, his voice lowering more until it was a velvet rasp.
Diana stilled, her entire body going rigid. “Do not.”
“If my mind refuses to cooperate,” he continued, ignoring her protest as he let his gaze rake over her with unashamed, alpha possessiveness, “I am confident that a more… visceral approach might prove effective. The body often remembers what the mind chooses to discard.”
Her breath hitched, her chest rising and falling rapidly beneath the lace of her bodice.
“I have noticed, Diana,” he continued. He let his gaze linger on the pulse thrumming frantically in her neck.
“That, for all your talk of formal interactions, you do not retreat when I approach. You bristle. You argue. And yet, you remain in the room. You remained in the greenhouse today when you could have fled the moment you saw me.”
“That is circumstance,” she replied, her voice tight with a humiliation she couldn’t hide. “I was simply… caught off guard.”
“Is it?” He let his gaze linger on her lips a moment longer than courtesy—or even decency—required.
The impulse surprised him, yet he did nothing to restrain it.
“A taste of you,” he said, his voice lowering into something more intimate than the setting warranted, “might be the very thing to cure all lingering ailments. I wonder… if I kissed you now, would the year of silence simply vanish?”
Diana’s fingers tightened around her linen napkin until her knuckles went white. She opened her mouth, clearly prepared to argue.
Alexander watched her with quiet fascination. The defiance in her posture had sharpened, but there was something else there too, a flicker of uncertainty he did not quite understand but found unexpectedly compelling.
Before she could speak, a sharp, rhythmic knock sounded at the dining room door.
Alexander’s attention shifted at once as the tension between them snapped. He leaned back slightly as the butler entered and bowed.
The butler entered and bowed. “Your Grace. Lady Salford has arrived.”
Alexander frowned. The name rang a bell in his mind, yet he couldn’t quite find where it led.
Diana’s gaze flickered toward the door, her mask of composure snapping back into place.
Before Alexander could respond, the heavy mahogany doors swung wide.
A small, formidable gray-haired woman moved into the room with the decisive energy of a queen mother.
Her steps were brisk, and her keen, hawk-like eyes swept over the table, the candles, and the two of them with a precision that missed nothing.
“Alexander,” she declared, her voice carrying a crisp authority that immediately commanded the room.
He rose at once, instinctively.
The woman paused, leaning slightly on her silver-topped cane as she studied him critically. “You did not greet me at the door. I find the standards of this house have slipped in my absence.”
“I was occupied,” Alexander replied, his voice dropping into a smooth, courtly register.
Diana stepped forward, her movements a fluid dance of effortless grace. “Grandmother, we are delighted—and quite surprised—that you have come. Please, forgive our lack of preparation.”
Alexander caught the word immediately.
Grandmother.
His gaze flicked briefly between the two women. So, either Diana’s grandmother or his. Until the situation clarified itself, it seemed wiser not to question it aloud.
The older woman’s stern features softened instantly at Diana’s touch. “You are a treasure, child,” Lady Salford said warmly, patting Diana’s hand. “I regret missing your wedding dreadfully. My lungs were simply not up to the London damp at the time.”
Alexander inclined his head slightly. “Grandmother.”
She turned back to him, squinting as she scrutinized his face. After a moment, she nodded once, as if satisfied with what she found.
“My health has improved considerably,” she announced, waving a hand as if dismissing the very concept of illness. “I refuse to remain in the country while London thrives and the Season beckons. I have brought my trunks.”
Diana’s posture shifted, a subtle tightening of her shoulders that only Alexander noticed. “For the Season, Grandmother?”
“For its entirety,” Lady Salford replied brightly, her eyes sparkling with the prospect of gossip and ballrooms. “I shall remain with you both. I have already accepted an invitation to the Wetherby ball on Tuesday. I expect the Duke and Duchess of Rosewood to be the centerpiece of the evening.”
Alexander felt Diana’s sharp, panicked gaze land on him. They were standing on a precipice of a massive, public lie.
“You are most welcome,” Alexander said without a flicker of hesitation. “The house has been far too quiet.”
Lady Salford beamed, clearly joyous.
He gave no sign of the storm brewing beneath his ribs.
Whatever memories were absent, something in him still knew the steps—his hands, his posture, the instinctive ease with which he moved through it all.
He understood the theater of their class, even if he could not recall learning it.
He understood that a single moment of uncertainty would invite a microscopic scrutiny they could not afford.