“Love is a fable,” he dismissed. “A fiction. It is something we tell ourselves to believe in to distract us from how horrid life truly is.”
“You do not believe in it?” the duke asked him, surprise marking his tone.
“I believed in it once,” he elaborated. “Long enough to watch my former betrothed in the arms of another man, a man I once counted as a friend.”
Coventry whistled lowly. “Brutal.”
“Yes,” he agreed shortly. “It was. A lesson learned, and all that.”
“But do you not think what happened was not the fault of love, but rather the fault of the lady?” Coventry persisted. “The problem is not that love does not exist, but that your love was misplaced.”
By God.
He had never thought of it in such terms before.
He frowned at Coventry. For a painfully shy, awkward man who could scarcely string together a series of sentences, the duke was remarkably astute.
“I had never thought of it quite that way before, Coventry,” he admitted in spite of himself.
“When you ponder them enough, even the biggest problems become small,” the duke said.
Rand could not argue the point. Because he very much feared the Duke of Coventry was right. And that everything he had believed these last few years had been terribly, hopelessly wrong.
Grace did notparticularly feel like making merry.
Her rapidly escalating bargain with Rand had left her feeling confused. She had no wish to play another game of Snapdragon or Hoodman Blind. Instead, she was in the orangery, far away from the rest of the revelers. Though the glass-roofed room was heated, the chill of the day and the wind gusting outside still necessitated the use of a wrap.
The orange trees did not appear to mind, their glossed leaves lush and full. Fat fruits hung from their branches. Pomegranates and hibiscus beckoned as well, together creating the illusion that one had been secreted to an exotic clime.
The entire chamber was, she thought with a weary sigh, symbolic of her feigned betrothal with Aylesford: tempting, decadent, and false. The orange trees would wither in one night of brutal cold beyond these walls. The hibiscus would shrivel. And beyond this enchanted setting, her betrothal would fall as well.
Because it was not real.
Oranges were not meant to withstand the Oxfordshire winter.
Nor was her betrothal with Rand meant to last.
But last night had changed everything for her. She was losing her heart to him. It was undeniable. She could see it quite plainly. The last thing she had ever wanted was to fall in love with a self-assured scoundrel like him. The last thing she had ever imagined was that she would want their feigned betrothal to be real. However, she had, and she did. Which meant the time to make a decision was upon her.
She had to take action, and fast, if she wanted to protect herself from further hurt. She had been thinking of nothing but what she must do all day long. From the time she had risen in the morning, jarred from a dream of Rand kissing her so sweetly, the knowledge had weighed heavily upon her heart. There was only one option left to her: she needed to end this between them.
End the feigned betrothal.
End the bargain.
End the nights of debauchery.
And so doing, she could only hope, end the incessant longing she felt for him.
A footfall behind her alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone before the deep, delicious baritone she had come to know so well even spoke.
“Grace.”
How was it that even her name uttered in his voice sent a pang of longing through her?
Steeling herself against her reaction to him, she turned about. He was so handsome, a tentative smile on his lips. Those dashing dark waves she loved to run her fingers through fell over his brow in true rakish fashion. His bright-blue eyes were hungry and warm as they burned into hers.
A great rush of desire swept through her, along with remembrance of the intimacies they had shared. Their wicked nights of mutual debauchery. His kisses. His tongue on her most sensitive flesh. The way he had tasted. The delicious thickness of him in her hand, in her mouth.
