Chapter 23 #2
For one suspended moment, he did not answer. That silence told her more than any expression could have done.
The fire burned low in the grate, its glow carving hard lines over his face, sharpening the severe beauty of him until he looked less like the husband who had smiled at her across breakfast tables and more like the stranger who had once left her standing in pearls and white silk, humiliated before their marriage had even begun.
His sandy hair was faintly disordered as though he had run a hand through it too many times, and his merciless, beautiful eyes that had spent weeks looking at her with warmth and admiration were colder now, shuttered.
Something inside her lurched.
He set the glass down with care that was almost offensive in its calm. “I had business to attend to.”
The words were simple, flat. She knew that tone, that clipped, glacial dismissal. Diana stood very still, her fingers tightening at her sides beneath the silk of her gown.
“Business,” she repeated, and hated the way the word trembled at the edges.
His jaw shifted. “I do not require your permission to attend to my affairs.”
No. Of course not.
For several terrible seconds, she heard nothing but the rush of her own blood, hot and loud in her ears.
She knew before she even asked, and still she heard herself say it. “Your memories have returned.”
A strange stillness entered him then. He turned away from her for one heartbeat, reaching again for the glass he had set down, though he did not drink. The movement was enough.
Diana felt something inside her begin to break with slow, exquisite precision.
“So it is true.” A laugh escaped her then, though there was no humor in it, only disbelief sharpened into pain.
He finally looked at her fully. “You are being dramatic.”
The words struck like a slap.
Diana’s lips parted. She had not expected tenderness from him, but some stubborn part of her had still expected compassion. A trace of shame. Instead, he gave her that.
“Am I?” she asked, and her hazel eyes burned now, fixed on him with a brightness that was too near tears.
“You looked at me, touched me, kissed me, held me, shared my bed, listened while I spoke to you as though you wanted to gain my trust, all while knowing you remembered, and I am the one being dramatic?”
His hand tightened around the glass. “It changed nothing.”
“It changed everything.”
Her voice rang through the room, and for the first time, he flinched, his eyes narrowing.
Diana took a step toward him before she could stop herself, hurt pushing her where pride would have held her back. “Why did you not tell me?”
His expression hardened. “Because it was not your business.”
The room went silent. For one monstrous moment, she simply stared at him, unable to breathe properly.
As though all those evenings, all those glances, all those murmured words in the darkness, all those careful moments in which she had begun to think this man might choose her, had been nothing more than an inconvenience.
“My business?” she repeated softly. “My business?”
He set the glass down with more force this time. “Do not make this into something it is not.”
She stared at him with a kind of horrified wonder. “And what, precisely, is it not?”
He exhaled sharply, impatience flashing. “I remembered. I had no wish to discuss it before I understood the whole of what happened to me. That is all.”
“No wish.” She tasted the words like poison. “Of course. A discussion with your wife would have been an inconvenience.”
“That is enough.”
“No.” The word tore from her, low and shaking. “No, it is not enough, Alexander. You do not get to become cold and distant and imagine that I shall simply stand here and accept it because now it suits you to shut me out. I have already done that once.”
Something flickered in his face then. His eyes moved over her for a fraction too long, as though the sight of her unsettled him in ways he did not wish to examine.
For one miserable instant, her body answered that gaze anyway. She hated it. Hated the way he still filled the room. Hated the way his nearness still made her skin aware, made her chest ache, made memory rise against her will.
The man who cared for her had not existed. She felt sick.
His voice dropped lower. “I shall leave once I find out what happened.”
There it was.
For a second, she did not understand the words, though she heard them clearly. They floated toward her one by one and then assembled themselves into meaning with slow, merciless finality.
Her pulse stumbled.
He continued, each word cutting, controlled, the very model of the cold Duke of Rosewood she had once learned to despise. “I mean to know who attacked me and why. Once I have the truth, there will be no further reason for me to remain in London.”
Diana could not move.
She had known better. She had known this could happen. She had told herself, again and again, that the warmth in him belonged to his forgetting, that memory would turn him back into the man who had abandoned her without a backward glance.
And now he stood before her and proved her right so thoroughly that the triumph of it was unbearable.
“When,” she asked, and her voice sounded distant to her own ears, “did you decide that I was no longer worth the truth? Was it the moment you remembered, or was I merely useful until then?”
His expression tightened. “Do not put words into my mouth.”
“I have no need to. You have said enough.”
He took a step toward her then. The movement only made the tears burn hotter behind her eyes. “Diana—”
“No.” She stepped back, and the word came sharp and trembling. “Do not say my name as though you still have any right to soothe me.”
He went still. The fire crackled behind him.
When she spoke again, her voice was lower, more terrible for being calm. “I was a fool.”
His jaw hardened. “You know nothing of what this has cost me.”
She laughed again, and this time the sound broke. “And you know nothing of what it has cost me to believe you.”
That landed. She saw it in the briefest fracture around his eyes. She wanted him to cross the room, to take her face in his hands, to tell her she was wrong. But he said nothing.
Diana’s throat ached with the effort of swallowing around it.
She looked at him and saw both men now. The husband who had made her blush and burn and soften despite herself.
The Duke, who had left her on her wedding day and would leave her again as soon as his own purposes were served.
She did not know which vision hurt more.
“I hate that I was right,” she whispered.
A muscle flickered in his jaw. “Diana—”
But she was already turning away, because if she stayed another moment, she might disgrace herself utterly and break in front of him.
He had not earned the sight of that. Her heart felt too large for her chest. She crossed the room with as much dignity as she could gather, though each step seemed to split her open afresh.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
She stopped with her hand on the door, but did not turn.
“Away from you,” she said, and her voice shook despite all her efforts to steady it.
Then she opened the door.
The corridor beyond was cooler, darker, impossibly quiet. She stepped into it, and only once the door had closed behind her did the first tear finally slip free, warm and humiliating against her cheek. She brushed it away at once, almost violently.
Diana kept walking, her spine straight, her head high, though it felt as though every soft, foolish dream she had not meant to nurture had been crushed beneath the heel of the same man who had first taught her how it felt to be wanted.