Chapter 26 #2
“Think,” Cartwright said, his tone quieter now, more deliberate, as though he were placing each word with care. “If this was jealousy, then it did not begin in that alley. It began long before. Can you name any man who might have looked at the Duchess and believed himself entitled to her?”
Alexander did not answer at once. A pressure started building somewhere deep and insistent, forcing its way upward whether he wished it or not.
He had seen men admire Diana. That was nothing.
Any man with eyes had admired her. But this—this was different.
This required fixation. Resentment. The kind of twisted conviction that turned admiration into ownership.
His mind resisted it for one heartbeat. Then—
Something turned sharply behind his eyes, and the room shifted out of alignment for one terrible second.
Pain lanced through his skull so suddenly that he reached for the arm of the chair on instinct, his fingers biting hard into the leather.
The headache was sharp, cruel, as if some locked door in his mind had been wrenched from its hinges.
“Your Grace?”
Alexander could not answer.
The gaming hell came back to him not as a sequence at first, but as sensation.
Heat. Tobacco. A room thick with stale spirits and male voices.
A polished table beneath his gloved hand.
A man across from him speaking quickly—too quickly—about contracts, shipments, numbers, all of it carrying the greasy urgency of someone who wanted to be believed and feared discovery.
The sudden need for air. The alley outside, colder than he had expected, wet stone glistening under a reluctant moon. His temper was already sharpened by the interview he had just left. Then the voice.
Martin.
The pain in Alexander’s head burst brighter, and with it came the final missing piece.
He remembered turning. He remembered the dark outline of Martin Hyatt stepping from the shadows.
He remembered the first hard throb of warning in his own gut, that deep instinct that knew danger before the mind arranged it into logic. And then he remembered the blow.
Cartwright was on his feet now. “Your Grace.”
Alexander looked up.
The room had settled again, but only outwardly. Inside him, something had gone violently, irreversibly still.
“It was Martin Hyatt,” he said, and his voice sounded almost unlike his own, stripped so flat by certainty that even he heard the danger in it. “Not only the face. The voice. I heard him before I turned.”
Cartwright’s brows drew together. “The Baron?”
“Yes.”
The word cracked out of him. He rose so abruptly that the chair shoved back against the carpet with a forceful scrape. All the tension he had been containing since dawn surged into motion at once.
“She is in danger.”
Cartwright’s expression changed at once. “You do not know that yet.”
“I do.” Alexander seized his gloves from the sideboard, then flung them down again because the mere act of putting them on felt like intolerable delay. “If he came to the house—if he has watched us—if he believes I stand between him and—”
He broke off, because Diana’s face had risen in his mind with such force that it momentarily stole the remainder of the sentence from him. Diana half turned toward a voice she trusted. Diana was exhausted enough to accept comfort when it was offered gently.
His stomach clenched hard.
Cartwright saw it happen. “Go.”
Alexander was already moving.
He snatched up his gloves, shoved them on as he strode for the door, then stopped only long enough to turn back. “Send word to no one until I know more. And if I am correct—”
“You will not be alone for long,” Cartwright said, his voice steady now, all business beneath the urgency. “But do not wait for me if you have a direction. Go.”
Alexander did not thank him. He was past speech, which was not necessary. He tore out of the house and down the front steps, every beat of his heart striking against his ribs with punishing force.
He swung into the saddle and drove the animal hard back toward Rosewood House.
The city blurred. Alexander hated every inch of it. Hated the congestion, the wasted seconds, the humanity of it.
He had let this happen. He had spent days avoiding her in the name of pride, confusion, punishment, perhaps even fear of his own weakness where she was concerned.
Alexander’s hands tightened viciously on the reins. If Martin had laid so much as one hand on her—
The thought cut off. He didn’t want to finish it.
Suddenly, with a clarity that struck deeper than any returning memory, he understood.
This—this instinct to take control, to act, to claim what mattered before it was taken from him—had always been there. But so had the instinct to withdraw. To distance. To convince himself that absence was protection. That denial was strength.
He had been wrong.
Every cold, calculated decision that had kept him from her, every moment he had turned away instead of reaching—none of it had protected her. It had only left her alone and vulnerable.
The realization settled hard in his chest, leaving no room for doubt.
He knew now that it had all been his doing. But regret was a useless thing. It would not bring her back to him. It would not undo the damage he had already caused.
He leaned forward in the saddle, breath steadying by force.
He would reach her in time. And whatever awaited him, whatever truth, whatever consequence, he would face it without retreat. Without distance. Without the cowardice he had once mistaken for control.
It was a dangerous thing to stand so close to her and feel so much. But it was nothing compared to the terror of losing her entirely.
His memory had been stripped from him, piece by piece, and in its place, something clearer had taken root.
He had been wrong before. He would not be again.
He reached Rosewood House in a thunder of hooves and barely waited for the groom before dismounting. He took the front steps two at a time and slammed through the doors with enough force to startle the footman on duty into an audible gasp.
“Where is the Duchess?” The question cracked through the hall.
The servants froze. One of the maids carrying a vase near the drawing room threshold went pale. The butler, who had appeared from some discreet distance as though summoned by instinct rather than sound, stopped short.
“Your Grace,” he began cautiously, “Her Grace—”
“Where is she?”
The butler’s throat moved. “She went out, Your Grace.”
Alexander went cold from head to heel. “With whom?”
There was a pause.
“Lord Tilbridge, Your Grace.”
For one terrible moment, the hall vanished around him.
He no longer saw the marble underfoot, the polished banister, the faces turning white before him.
He saw only Diana stepping into Martin’s carriage because she was hurt and proud and tired and because he himself had driven her to accept comfort wherever she found it.
“How long ago?”
“Less than an hour, Your Grace,” the butler said quickly now, alarmed perhaps by whatever he saw in Alexander’s face. “Perhaps forty minutes. No more.”
Alexander’s heart kicked so violently against his ribs that it almost hurt. “Which direction?”
One of the footmen found his voice first. “West, Your Grace. They turned west at the square.”
Alexander’s mind leapt at once over the city map he knew as instinctively as he knew his own hand.
He pivoted sharply toward the doors, then stopped just long enough to bark, “If Cartwright sends men after me, tell them I have taken the quieter western road beyond the park and not the thoroughfare. And if anyone asks after the Duchess, she is not to be discussed in this house with anyone outside it. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
He was gone before the final word had settled.
The horse flew beneath him. Wind tore at Alexander’s coat and hair. The city began at last to thin around the edges as he pushed farther outward, and with every stretch of quieter road, his dread sharpened.
It was too easy now to imagine her in that carriage.
Too easy to see the shape of her body in the shadowed interior, the pale curve of her throat above her gown, the quickened rise and fall of her breath once Martin’s pretense gave way.
He knew how trust disappeared from her face because he had done it himself.
He knew, too, how beautiful she was when startled, when angry, when flushed with the effort of holding herself together.
The thought of Martin seeing any of it, touching any of it, using her vulnerability to wedge himself closer, sent a wave of such violent possessive fury through Alexander that he had to force his mind back into order.
He wanted her alive. He wanted her furious and safe in his drawing room, loathing him if she must, rather than frightened in another man’s grasp.
The road forked ahead.
Alexander slowed only enough to study the marks in the dirt where wheels had passed.
There, a recent carriage, heavier than a gig, the right width, one wheel dragging slightly more on the left where the road dipped.
He leaned down from the saddle, eyes narrowing. Fresh.
Please God, let me be on time.