She looked up at him, loving every angle of his face, loving even the scar that marred the perfection there. She didn’t want perfection. She wasn’t perfect herself. The scar represented who this man had once been. Who he had become. And in that moment, everything in her heart became very clear.
“Alexander,” she said, her heart pounding. “I-I love you.”
He stiffened against her, his face going from relaxed and content to taut and unreadable. He slowly moved away from her, forcing her to sit up. Then he got to his feet and stared down at her.
“What did you say?” he asked.
She swallowed hard. “I said I love you.”
He shook his head and spun away from her, pacing down to the water’s edge. She let him stand there for a moment, but it quickly became clear that he had no plans to come back to her.
Her hands were shaking as she got up and followed him. “I-I’m not asking—”
“Stop.” He turned on her, his eyes flashing with emotions that he couldn’t hide. She could see him trying to do so, but the rawness was there, harsher and harder than it had been even when he spoke of his past.
“Alexander,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Why? Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true,” she confessed, her hands shaking. “I have spent a lifetime alone, feeling lost. With you, I’m found. And I think if you look inside yourself, you feel the same way.”
“I don’t,” he snapped, but his voice cracked. “I don’t feelanything, Marianne, that is what you don’t understand. I am not some savior you can run to, declare your love and find some ending like in a fairytale. I am a bastard, I always have been. Whatever small amount of love I had to give, it died with my sister. I will never love you back. I will never give you the life you desire. The one you deserve.”
“You are punishing yourself for sins you committed years ago,” she argued, unwilling to let him push her away when everything had just become so clear to her.
“No, Marianne, I’m not,” he said. His voice was becoming calmer and his face harder. “I’m just fucking you. Do you understand? You are nothing more to me than a body to fuck. There is nothing else to it. Get that through your head.”
She stared at him, searching for the warmth she knew he possessed. Trying to find the gentleness that lurked beneath his hard exterior. But there was none. He had crushed it, hiding it from her just as he insisted on hiding his heart.
In that moment, she realized he mightneverbe capable of sharing more. That recognition tore her in two.
She nodded slowly. “I see,” she whispered, praying she would not burst into tears.
He turned away from her. “I’m returning to the house. Will you go with me?”
She pursed her lips. “No. No, I’ll make my own way back.”
He hesitated, then set his jaw into a hard line. “As you wish, Marianne.”
He turned and left her there, standing beside the water, her heart full of gifts that he was unwilling to accept. Her heart filled with an ache that he refused to acknowledge or heal because his own pain was so stark. So clear.
And she had never felt so alone in her entire life. Nor so uncertain. Laying herself on the line had not resulted in the happiness she had briefly glimpsed with this man.
And now it threatened any future she might make with her sister. Because there was no way Alexander would want her here now. His face had made that clear, as had the cruel way in which he had dismissed her.
She had no idea what to do.
Chapter Eleven
Alexander burst back into the house, his chest burning with pain, with anger and with something far stronger. Something he didn’t want.
Hope.
When Marianne had stood before him, so bravely making her confession of her heart, what had stirred most powerfully in him was hope.
That and fear. Gripping fear of what he could destroy if he accepted her love. He had devastated his sister. He could not bear to do the same to Marianne.
He could hardly breathe as he moved to go to his study. He needed to be alone, to think without Marianne’s presence in every corner of his heart. Only even his office was not safe from her. He stared at his desk and thought of how she had intruded upon his pain there. Confronted him there. Touched him there, body and soul.
