“You like me,” she repeated dully.
“A great deal,” he added.
“And admire me.”
He nodded, a sick sensation settling in his gut which told him he was not helping his cause. “Yes.”
Her ordinarily lush lips tightened. “You want to marry me because you require my share of the Winter fortune, and because you like and admire me.”
Bloody hell. The tone of her voice was surely a harbinger of doom.
He wanted to say more, but the familiar prickle of perspiration on his brow and the thudding of his heart warned him of a different sort of doom entirely.
The affliction.
“Yes,” was all he could manage. Because somewhere deep inside him, he was locked inside that dark chamber.
His father had told him he was weak, and he was. Gill had proven it again and again. Though his bastard of a sire had perished, his legacy lived on.
“Then I stand firm in my decision,” she told him. “I am glad to see you are not suffering from a lung infection as my sister supposed. Indeed, you seem quite hale for one who has been hiding within his chamber for the span of a day.”
He had not been hiding. He had been waiting. Waiting for her to come to him.
But instead of winning her over, he had further pushed her away. He could read it in her eyes. See it in the stubborn set of her chin. In the grim clench of her jaw. Perhaps, this time he had pushed her too far. Further than he would be able to reach.
Perhaps it was just as well.
Perhaps there was, just as Father had always scornfully insisted, something inherently wrong with him. Christabella would do far better to find a whole man. One who could love her as she deserved. Not a man who was too bound by the past to allow himself to feel.
Yes, if he cared for her, there was only one answer. And he saw it now with a grim resolution. He had been wrong, terribly wrong, to think he could find happiness. That he deserved it. That he was worthy of someone as beautiful, sparkling, and wonderful as Miss Christabella Winter.
For he was most decidedly not.
“Marry another gentleman, Miss Winter,” he said harshly, though the words broke him apart inside. “One who is more worthy than I could ever hope to be. Whoever he is, I wish you happy with him.”
“Gill,” she protested, her certainty seeming to crumble before his eyes.
He would have to be resolute.
“You may address me as Your Grace, Miss Winter,” he told her in his frostiest ducal accents. The ones he scarcely ever had cause to use.
Mostly because his tongue ordinarily refused to function.
She recoiled, taking a step back as if he had struck her. “Of course. Forgive me my familiarity, Your Grace. I will go now and leave you to your illness. I, too, wish you happy.”
With that grim, parting volley, she dipped into a hasty curtsy.
Before he could regret his words, she was gone.
And when the door slammed closed and he was alone once more, that was when the regret truly hit him. Hit him like the weight of a bloody stone castle wall falling upon him.
He knew, with devastating certainty, that he had just lost his only chance of ever finding happiness. If indeed he had ever had one to begin with.
Christabella did notwant to marry someone else.
She wanted to marry Gill.
Infuriating, handsome, irritating, aloof, confusing, wonderful, frustrating Gill. The Duke of Coventry. The man she was going to marry. Even if he was wrong about everything he had just said to her. Even if she would as soon turn back to his chamber and rail at him as tell him she loved him.
