“I will ask you once more to let me into this chamber so that I can explain everything to you.” He gave the knob another violent turn, smacking the door with what sounded like his palm. “I have the key. Do not make me get it, I beg you.”
Of course, he would have the key. She returned to the task of gathering up the things she wished to take with her. “I hope you did not send my family away, for I will be accompanying them when they leave.”
How she managed to speak to him without breaking down, she did not know. Perhaps her strength was born from necessity. Perhaps from a tenacity she had not realized she possessed. Either way, she was grateful that she did not sound nearly as weak and defeated as she felt.
“Lydia.” The knob twitched. “You cannot leave me, my love. Please, listen to what I have to say.”
His endearment had her itching to throw something else, but despite the temptation, violence was not in her. Smashing crystal and porcelain would not fill the hollow void inside her or cure what ailed her. She felt sapped. Drained. Deflated and sad.
Most of all, brokenhearted. “I can and will, as I have no wish to hear any more of your lies.”
“I never lied to you,” he dared to insist.
Lydia decided she did not require another thing if it meant having to listen to any more of his nonsense. “You married me to settle your father’s debts with my dowry, all while feigning an interest in me and pretending to court me. There is no other explanation for what you have done, and I will not argue a moment more. I. Am. Leaving. You.” She enunciated the last with more force than necessary, gathering up the sheet and its contents and slinging it over her shoulder like a sack.
“I married you because I love you. It is true that I required a dowry, but another’s dowry would have done every bit as well, Lydia.” Warwick’s voice sounded uncharacteristically desperate now. “I could have easily found a bride to bring me a greater fortune, but I did not want anyone else. I wanted you.”
She wondered why he hadn’t done as he’d threatened and retrieved the key. Either that too was a prevarication, or he hadn’t the gumption to barge his way inside after what he had done.
Lydia stopped before the door, another surge of pain making tears prick her eyes. She wished its source was the foot with which she had kicked the door, but it was not. “If you loved me, you would have confided in me. And if you care for me at all in any way, you will leave now and allow me to go in peace.”
The lock clicked then, and the door swung open, revealing him. The key had been in his possession all along, then. Just another falsehood in an endless sea. His blue eyes scorched her, searing with their intensity. He stepped forward, his expression hard, lips firmed.
“You had the key,” she accused, as if it mattered, this one small untruth between them. At this proximity, she could not quite stave off her reaction to him—his scent, his beauty, his body all so bitterly compelling—for as much as she knew what he could do to her, she also knew he was a heartless dissembler.
“The lock is easily picked,” he countered, “and it always has been. I simply saved myself some trouble. Lydia, if you believe nothing else I say, believe this: I love you. My love for you is endless and deep as the night’s sky. It is all consuming, all powerful, and nothing I ever imagined was possible before you. I believe that I loved you from the moment that I fished you from the pond, that even then, I was saving you for me, that I recognized you as my own, my other half. I love you so much that I cannot—will not—fathom my life without you in it. If you leave this night, you take my heart and everything I am with you.”
His words left her mouth dry, the hands clutching the hastily gathered sheet and its contents trembling. She could not look away from his gaze, so earnest and intense. And she wanted to believe him. Her heart wanted to believe him.
But the logical portion of her mind—the part of her that believed in substance and ration and fact—refused to. She had already lost so much to him, and she needed time and distance. To be away from him, to clear her mind. “I need to go, Warwick,” she forced herself to say, heart breaking all over again. “Pray do not stop me.”
And then she slipped past him and down the hall, clenching her small bundle of inanimate objects to her bosom as though it could fill the gaping chasm within her. But she knew the truth as she made her feet walk steadily away from the man she had fallen in love with. Nothing could diminish the emptiness inside her. Nor did his footsteps follow her, regardless of how much her foolish heart wished they did.
