And yet…
Hazel pressed her fingers to her heated cheeks. What unsettled her most was that her body had responded before her mind could form a single coherent objection. Her pulse had leapt beneath his thumb. Her breath had caught. Her feet had nearly forgotten their steps.
It was a disaster… a thrilling, treacherous disaster.
“I am merely overtired,” she muttered. “That is all. Emotionally drained… disoriented from the day, and,” her voice wobbled, “and entirely misled by compliments.”
Compliments she had not expected.
Compliments she had not believed.
Compliments she… felt.
She firmly set the comb on her vanity, as though the object itself were to blame, and stared at her reflection once more.
“I amnotfalling in love,” she insisted, narrowing her eyes.
No. Certainly not.
She had seen love destroy sensible people. She had watched it unravel families, shake her own sisters senseless, and causeotherwise rational women to swoon, sigh, and forget the existence of reason entirely. And now, it seemed that even she, Hazel Thorne, the fortress of practicality, was swayed by the way her husband had held her in a ballroom lit by a hundred candles.
“Oh, this is dreadful,” she whispered.
Marriage of convenience. That was what they’d agreed to. That was what she wanted. That was whathewanted. Anything else was unacceptable.
She had control of herself. She did. She absolutely…
Her gaze flicked to the door. Her heart jolted. For one breathless moment, she thought she heard footsteps in the corridor. Her hands froze.
Greyson?
But the footsteps,ifthey had been footsteps at all, faded into silence. After several seconds of taut, suspended dread, Hazel let out a shaky exhale.
“Foolish,” she muttered.
Yet even as she rose to blow out the candles, her pulse betrayed her again. It was their wedding night. And while she knew that he wanted nothing more from their union than pragmatic companionship, a small, traitorous part of her was no longer entirely certain what she herself wanted.
Greyson had never imagined that resisting the impulse to walk down the corridor to his wife’s bedchamber would require anything resembling effort.
He had foolishly assumed that the arrangement they had agreed upon would safeguard him from such impulses. A marriage of convenience was clean and rational. What Hazel wanted aligned beautifully with what he himself wanted: companionship without entanglement, loyalty without vulnerability, and a household without heartache.
Yet as he stood outside his own chamber that night, he found himself rooted to the floor in uncharacteristic indecision. He was not going to consummate the marriage. That had been the agreement, and he respected it. He respectedher.
But the urge to check on her, to knock, to speak to her, to see if her eyes still danced with that irritating, intoxicating spark, pulled at him with unsettling force. He took one step toward her door, then stopped.
Absolutely not.
He would not be that man, the sort who intrudes, who presses expectations upon a bride after an exhausting wedding day, who mistakes shared amusement for invitation. Hazel deservedbetter than that. She deserved control of her own evening, perhaps for the first time in her life.
As for himself, he needed distance… and a drink. Preferably several.
So, that very same night, he found himself in a small establishment that would provide exactly that. The place was modest and dimly lit, but most importantly, it was blessedly free of wedding chatter. Greyson had nearly convinced himself he had made the sensible choice when a familiar voice cut through the quiet.
“Callbury?”
Greyson turned, only to lock eyes with Robert Firming, the Duke of Aberon. He was seated alone at a corner table, nursing a glass of brandy and wearing the expression of a new father who had not slept in months but was too dignified to admit it.
Greyson exhaled. “Aberon.”
