There was a beat of silence and Marianne didn’t miss it.
“Like some people,” she said, her tone soft as silk but sharp as a knife’s edge.
“Yes,” Alaric said quietly. “Exactly like some people.”
That stilled her. For the first time since Lord Dupont’s revelation had detonated their fragile world, she looked directly at him. And beneath the righteous anger, beneath the betrayal and humiliation and winter in her eyes, he saw the glimmer of what she was really fighting. Real, human, raw hurt.
It was the kind of look that stripped a man of his titles, his excuses, and his defenses. The look of someone who’d let herselfbelieve, just once, that she could trust again and learned she was wrong.
"Why?" she asked softly, the other judges suddenly very interested in their scoring sheets. "Just tell me why."
"Because I'm a coward," he said simply. "Because it was easier to be nobody than to be somebody. Because for four days, I got to be just a man helping with a fair, not a duke with responsibilities and expectations and so many years of failure behind him."
"That's not good enough."
"I know."
"You made me trust you."
"I know."
"You made me..." She stopped, shaking her head. "It doesn't matter."
"It does matter. Marianne, what we shared..."
"What we shared was based on a lie."
"No. My name was a lie. Everything else was true."
"How can I believe that?"
"Because I'm still here. The truth is out. I could leave, go back to London, never see any of you again. But I'm here,judging pies, because leaving would mean never seeing you again, and that's... unacceptable."
"Unacceptable," she repeated. "Like inadequate, another of your safe words."
"There's nothing safe about what I feel for you."
The judges were not even pretending to look at their sheets anymore. Mrs. Morrison was actually leaning forward in anticipation.
"Don't," Marianne said. "Don't you dare make declarations now, in front of everyone, when you couldn't even tell me the truth in private."
"When should I make them?"
"Never. You should never make them because you're leaving tomorrow and going back to your real life, and I'm staying here in mine, and that's how it should be."
"What if I don't want to leave?"
"Dukes don't live in villages."
"This one could."
"No," she said firmly. "He couldn't. Because this village doesn't need another person who plays at understanding their lives. We need someone real, someone honest, someone who actually cares about more than just playing Christmas games for a few days."
"I care!"
"About what? About me? About the village? About anything beyond your own entertainment?"
"Yes."
