When she stopped where she had begun, his expression was just as hard as it had been. Menacing, almost. She could not imagine anyone meeting this man in battle and not cowering before him.
“Tell me about what occurred. Where were you?” His voice was tight, his blue gaze dark and impenetrable, the color of the sky before a ravaging storm.
“I was returning from a visit to Charles when it happened.”
Charles, she reminded Wicked Violet sternly.Your betrothed. The man who loves you.
Do you suppose he will ever love you more than his mother and his orchids?Wicked Violet asked snidely.
Oh dear.
This was truly getting out of hand. She could not forever be two people, the Violet who longed for Strathmore, and the Violet who knew she should settle for the life she could build with Charles, a man who already loved her. Even if his kisses did nothing to instill even a speck of longing within her.
“You were visiting Flowerpot,” the duke gritted. “How lovely. Tell me, were the two of you counting his orchids and admiring his hothouse lemons? Discussing the rituals of bees? Did he regale you with tales of toiling amidst bulbs and soil?”
“He has oranges, not lemons,” she corrected before she could stop herself. “And we were not counting the orchids. He was explaining the recent troubles he has had with them. A green fungus on the bulb, which requires treatment.”
“Christ.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Did he kiss you? No. Do not answer. I do not wish to know.”
He had, and there was no reason why she should be ashamed to have kissed the man who would become her husband, or why she should feel guilty for having done so now, standing before a man who had no claims upon her. A man she had known for a mere handful of days.
But she did.
Her cheeks prickled and she resisted the urge to look away from his gaze. “What has any of this to do with my carriage being shot at?”
He sighed, searching her expression, his posture going even more rigid. “So he did kiss you then. No need to protest, for I can see it in your telltale flush, my lady. Good God.”
She owed no loyalty to the beautiful conundrum of a man before her, she reminded herself. He was not her betrothed. Charles was. She was destined to become the Countess of Almsley.
Why did that knowledge leave her feeling nothing but empty?
She frowned at him as much as at herself. “I fail to see why you should care what occurred between myself and Charles, Strathmore. He shall be my husband soon enough. It is no concern of yours.”
The duke’s hands tightened into fists at his sides. “He is not worthy of you, damn it.”
Her patience was growing thin. First, he had trespassed upon her chamber—at least when she had visited his in equally disastrous, wholly inappropriate fashion, she had knocked and waited for her invitation to enter—and now he was making demands of her.
How dare he continue to disparage Charles?
“Why is he not worthy of me?” she demanded, seizing on to her ire, for it was far less dangerous than the emotions Strathmore ordinarily provoked within her. “Is it because he enjoys horticulture?”
“It is because he has never kissed you properly, damn it, and I know it because of the way you responded to me.” He raked those long fingers through his hair now. “You are a woman who deserves to be kissed thoroughly and properly andoften. A woman who deserves to be worshiped. But not by Flowerpot, for Christ’s sake.”
His impassioned speech robbed her of the ability to form a coherent sentence.
He thought she deserved to be kissed thoroughly, properly, and often? That she deserved to be worshiped? Her, plain Lady Violet West, who’d had no more than a handful of suitors her entire life, including Charles, and none of whom could hold a candle to the undeniable beauty of the Duke of Strathmore?
She ought to defend Charles, surely. To deny everything the duke had just said. But the truth was, he was not entirely wrong. For she could honestly say no one had ever kissed her properly until the day Strathmore had first settled his mouth upon hers.
She took a deep breath, attempting to gather her wits and wrangle her emotions. To control herself and her reactions to this man, however she could, however she must.
“You have it wrong,” she said quietly. “For it is I who is not deserving of Charles. He is a good man, and he loves me, whilst I…”
She did not love him in return.
Violet had known it all along, but this was the first time she had nearly admitted it aloud to another. It remained her hope that, given time and the strength of a marriage—years of growing more familiar with Charles, and growing with him—she would learn to love him.
“You do not love him,” Strathmore finished for her, sounding far more pleased with the revelation than he had a right to.
