She turned back to the page, her voice steady now not from confidence, but from sheer rage.
“A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich?—”
He murmured again. “I could make you rich. You wouldn’t have to marry him. You know that, don’t you?”
Kitty kept her eyes on the page but tilted her chin toward him just enough to hiss, “If you say another word not written by Shakespeare, I will make quite certain everyone here hears precisely what you are.”
He chuckled, unbothered. It boiled her blood.
She continued reading, pushing each line out like venom.
“Only my blood speaks to you in my veins...”
God, how the words burned. The poetry mocked her, mocked everything she was trying to protect.
Norman should have been here. This scene should have been theirs. She could almost hear how he would have stumbled on the phrasing, how he would have looked at her instead of the script, as if she were the only thing anchoring him to the moment.
Instead, Grewin’s cologne filled her nose. A cloying, arrogant scent, too strong, like everything about him. She imagined stabbing the script straight into his hand. Or perhaps his eye.
“Such as I am,” she read, softer now, sadness threading through the anger, “I am yours.”
The words burned on her tongue—all the things she wished to say to Norman, the confessions and recriminations that might have bridged this unbearable distance between them. But instead of his familiar presence, she was trapped besidehim—this monstrous caricature of a gentleman whose very proximity made her skin prickle with revulsion.
A hot pressure built behind her eyes as the unshed tears thickened her throat. She willed them away with furious blinks, her gloved fingers twisting in the folds of her skirt. This was neither the time nor place for such weakness, yet the emotions rose unbidden—a dammed river threatening to breach its banks.
She opened her mouth, but the words caught like silk on a splintered rosebush. All that emerged was a shuddering breath that tasted of salt and humiliation.
He leaned in again, voice low. “You deserve a man who will claim you properly. Not one who hides.”
Her lips parted—to speak, to slap him, to scream. She wasn’t sure. But then the doors swung open furiously and the whole room stilled.
Kitty didn’t move. Her heart launched itself against her ribs. She couldn’t look at him. Not yet. Not with tears threatening.
Norman.
His voice, vibrating with uncontrolled fury, boomed across the room.
“What ishedoing here? Who invitedhim?”
She heard the scrape of his boots on the floor, the unmistakable tension in his voice as he repeated, louder this time:
“Who invited the Marquess of Grewin into my home?”
Nineteen
“Who,” Norman said, his voice thunder, low and electric, “invitedhim? I won’t ask again.”
The room fell into a sudden hush, chairs creaking as guests subtly leaned away from the confrontation blooming in front of them like a fire.
He hadn’t intended to join them today. There were too many pressing matters demanding his attention—endless considerations about Kitty, their strained marriage, the debt...
His study had become a prison of ledgers and unanswered questions.
Then the news came.
Grewin had arrived.
Something in his mind fractured at those words. A red haze descended, swallowing reason whole. The next moments existed only in fragments—the slam of his studio door, the startled gasp of a maid, the way his pulse roared in his ears like cannon fire.
