“I cannot.” His chest heaved. He looked wild, undone. Furious—though whether at her or himself, she could not tell. “We cannot do this.”
The words lashed her like a slap. She drew her knees up instinctively, wrapping her arms around them. Suddenly the air felt too cold, the water too exposed. The vulnerability that had thrilled her moments ago now felt like nakedness in the worst sense.
“I do not understand.”
“No.” He grabbed his shirt from the floor, yanking it over his head. It caught on his shoulders, and he wrenched it down violently. “You don’t.”
“Then explain it to me—”
“Finish up.” He would not look at her. His eyes were fixed somewhere over her shoulder, jaw tight enough she could see the muscle jumping. “I will wait outside.”
“Nicholas—”
“Now, Amelia.”
The cold finality in his voice froze whatever protest she had been forming. She watched, stunned, as he strode from the room.
The door closed softly.
Somehow, that was worse than if he had slammed it.
Amelia sat in the cooling water, trying to understand what had just happened. One moment he had been kissing her like the world was ending. The next, he was fleeing like she carried plague.
Her throat burned. Was it that? That she carried some mysterious curse, like her mother? She pressed her eyes shut, refusing to let the tears fall.
This is temporary. You knew this. You have always known this.
Knowing did not make it hurt less.
Nicholas pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window and counted his breaths.
One. Two. Three.
Behind the closed door, he could hear her moving. The rustle of fabric. A small, frustrated sound as she struggled with a lace or a hook. It required every scrap of his decimated willpower not to go back in.
He had come so close.
Another second of her looking at him like that, wet and bare and wanting, and he would have taken her against the copper rim of that tub without a single thought for the consequences.
And the consequences would have been absolute.
Their marriage had an expiration date. A contract with clauses and stipulations and a neat provision for annulment. The moment he bedded her, that contract became kindling. There would be no clean separation. No quiet dissolution that left their reputations intact and her future unshackled from his ruinous name.
She deserved the freedom to choose her own life. Not to be bound permanently to a man the courts had exiled from London for bedding another man’s wife.
Four. Five. Six.
The worst of it was that she had wanted him. And for one delirious moment, the future had ceased to exist, and there was only Amelia, gasping his name in the dark.
But the futuredidexist. And in it, she would wake beside a man who had trapped her in a marriage she never wanted. And whatever she felt for him now, whatever fragile warmth had grown between them in these strange weeks, would curdle into resentment.
He had watched that happen before. To his father. Twice.
The door opened behind him. He straightened, fastening his waistcoat, pulling on his coat. Rebuilding himself button by button.
She stood in the doorway wearing his dressing gown. The fabric swallowed her, the collar loose enough to expose the flushed skin of her throat where his mouth had been. The sight of it nearly broke him open again
“I will help with the dress,” he croaked.
