She looked at him then, her expression sad and resolute. “Duty must come before matters of the heart. I would not have you neglect yours for my sake. I won’t have you sacrifice for me. Your association with me is harmful to you. I can’t bear it. We must forget that we ever knew each other.”
He went white. “You cannot mean that.”
“I mean every word.”
“You would erase all that has been between us with one sentence?”
She said nothing, though in the silence she felt her heart was being torn from her breast.
“If that is what must be done,” she said at last.
His voice roughened. “You are telling me to choose duty over love.”
“Love.” A bitter laugh escaped her. “Do not speak to me of love. There can be no such thing between us. Whatever it was you felt, surely, it was trifling. Consider it a brief attachment, a summer caprice that passes as the season changes.”
“Do not dare belittle my feelings like this. Do not dare attribute motivations to me I never even considered.If you were anyone else, I would have you thrown out for speaking to me like this.”
“And yet I dare, because it is the truth.”
“Did none of it mean anything to you?” His voice was pleading.
She drew a sharp breath, clasping her shaking hands for support. “I was merely infatuated. That folly has already passed.”
Each of her words was a stab of a blade turned against herself. Still, she swung for the ultimate strike, straight for the heart.
With shaking fingers, she unhooked the necklace from about her neck and held it out to him. “Here. Take it back.”
He stared at the ring in her palm. The one he had given to her, with a vow that he loved her and wanted to marry her, one warm summer evening.
But that must have been in another life.
Since he did not extend his hand to take it, she placed it on the side table. “I had no business taking it. It was all based on lies and deception.” She steeled herself. “And I was so very young, impressionable, rather easy to have my head turned.”
His face grew ashen. “You cannot mean that.”
She threw her head back. “I mean every word.”
“Pippa!”
“It is best, Your Imperial Highness, that we no longer know each other.” Something died within her as she uttered those words, but she disregarded it and lifted her chin, cold, determined.
His face hardened, beautiful and cold as marble.
There was a silence that seemed to go on forever.
“Very well,” he bit out in a voice she had never heard before. “If that is what you wish.”
He snatched the ring, made a curt bow, turned on his heel, and left. The door closed behind him with quiet, dreadful finality.
Pippa did not move. Only her lips shaped the words, faint and trembling. “It had to be done. It had to be said.”
She buried her face in her hands.
Was it noble idiocy, to sacrifice her love to protect him? Or just a terrible kind of necessary cruelty?
It was the only way, she kept repeating to herself.
It was the only way.
