His nostrils flared and his gaze swept over her, but then he backed away. “You are not the first chit who has attempted to steal my hand in marriage, my dear. You will not be the last. And while I applaud the boldness of your methods, you have failed. Go home, Miss Montague. Before I have the guard called and you are ruined in reality.”
He turned to go and she reached out to catch his arm. He jerked it away in what seemed to be shock. She felt it, herself, for normally she would not be so bold. And yet panic and desperation clawed at her.
“This is my life,” she whispered. “I cannot marry this man. Please.”
For a moment there was a flicker over his face. Something deeper than the cad he normally showed the world. Then he hardened himself and she knew, before he even spoke, what he would do.
“That is not my problem,” he said. “Now go home.”
She stared up at him. So handsome and so emotionless. “You are as cold-hearted as they say.”
He smiled, almost sadly. “I am. Proudly. Now goodnight.”
He left the room and she stood where he’d left her, shaking, shocked. And as she trudged back out the way she’d come, back to the hack and its grinning driver, the desperation she’d felt that drove her here turned to resignation.
Her life was over. This man didn’t care. No one did.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Robert’s stomach turned as Katherine recounted the scene in his London home three years before, then turned away from him. Where there had been anger on her face at first, now there was a blankness. As if she were reliving those awful moments, reliving how she’d had to harden herself to the future that had been ripped from her hands.
A future he had made no effort to save for her.
For what felt like an eternity, the chamber around them was silent, and they each stood, separate as they pondered the facts of their shared past. A past he couldn’t even recall, thanks to the man he had been then. The man he had chosen to become to protect himself from any pain, any injury, any connection that he perceived as dangerous.
In his haste to protect himself, he had destroyed her.
No wonder she hated him.
“Katherine,” he said, his voice thick and heavy as he forced himself to speak. “Oh God, Katherine, I wish I could say I remember that night.”
“That is the worst part,” she whispered. “When you almost kissed me on that terrace, when you rejected me in your home the next night, those are two of the most pivotal moments of my existence. And you don’t remember either of them. I was just another woman in a line of women who meant nothing to you.”
He flinched. “That is how I lived my life,” he admitted. “Encounter to encounter, using pleasure to mask the pain. Using seduction to keep anyone who could come too close at arm’s length. I was…ama bastard. Like my father.”
When he said that last sentence, his heart broke. He could see now how true it was. The thing he had been running from, the monster who had always lived beneath his bed, he hadn’t avoided him. He’d become him. Hurting innocents.
And why could he see that? After all these years of his friends trying to open his eyes, to change his path, what made him so aware now? This woman. This amazing woman who had changed him long before she confronted him and made him look at what he’d become. Made himwantto change what he was. Become what she thought he could be, or used to think.
“Your father was honest, at least, in what he was,” she said, turning her face. “He did not pretend to change, at least not in any of the stories you have whispered to me in the dark. So you won your bet, Robert. Bully for you.”
She moved toward the door and he panicked. She would leave. Tomorrow she would go back to London. This would be over, truly over, if he didn’t stop her now.
“Please, Katherine. You are not about a bet for me. You never truly were.” He caught her arm and turned her back toward him. “You must know that I—”
Her eyes went wide and she jerked away to interrupt his confession. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare. Just let me go, Robert. It is what you are best at.”
She said nothing more, but left the room, left him. And the heart that he had spent a lifetime stifling, putting up walls so he could pretend it did not exist, shattered.
Katherine stumbled, blinded by tears, as she careened through the halls toward the stairs that would take her to her chamber. She wanted to lock herself away. Away from her argument with Robert, away from his voice echoing in her ears. Telling Berronburg that she was a conquest, that same voice telling her she was more. She was so tangled by all that had transpired, she just wanted to hide from it all.
And knew she couldn’t.
She raced up the stairs and turned toward her room. Just as she was about to reach it, the door across the hall opened and Isabel stepped out. For a moment the duchess smiled at her, but then her face fell. “Oh, Katherine,” she said, racing to her. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Katherine muttered, fumbling with the door and finally getting it open. “Oh, nothing, please go back to the party.”
Isabel followed her into the chamber, hands on her hips. “I will not. Not when you look so stricken. What is going on?”
