Alyssia found it hard, almost impossible, to look away again.
Every detail of him felt like a dream she’d dared to forget. A fevered hallucination from another life. Except he was real. Which was absurd, since she’d never seen him as an adult man before tonight. Hergaze drifted to the shadow on his jaw again. Rough. Rugged. What had he been through all these years? Where had he been? Had he lived well? The more she watched him, the more her pulse throbbed wildly against her throat.
Her nose scrunched up as he swallowed down another glass of whatever drinks they’d been serving each round. How many had it been? Four? Five? Three men had already toppled over, pale in the face. Three remained.
Laughter. Applause.
Ridiculous.
Giles, however, but for some pearls of moisture across his face, looked better than his remaining opponents. Alyssia suddenly questioned her life’s choices. Who would have thought that they would lead back to him? The boy who’d haunted her dreams. The boy who had disappeared with neither a word nor trace of life. A boy who seemed to have hardened into a man who battled, and won, empires.
And he fought this game for her. To what end? For what purpose?
Another man at the table collapsed to the ground, leaving only two, Giles showing no signs of being defeated.
How could her breath not catch?
She knew—deep in her bones, in the places where truth outlived memory—that whatever game he was playing down there...
He would not lose.
This could not be happening. Nothing had readied her for this. Was it too late to run?
Alyssia backed into the shadows, seeking to calm the roar in her chest. This was not the outcome she’d fortified herself for when she’d left her friend’s house this afternoon. She’d imagined discomfort. Perhaps nerves. She hadn’t imaginedhim. Not here. Not in this den of ruin. Certainly not looking like that. Commanding, unreadable, impossibly dangerous.
The floor beneath her shifted.
She drew a shaky breath and pressed her fingers against the wall behind her. Her heart, however, wouldn’t stop pounding. The longer he remained standing, the more something cracked open within her, threatening to allow everything she’d been holding in for years to spill forth. Anger. Hurt. Pain. And seeing his face again, more anger.
Lawd, what bitter twist of luck had brought that ghost here tonight?
“You’re not the first lady to come here hoping for one thing,” Mrs. Dove-Lyon, who had left her to her thoughts, said, following her into the shadows, “and walk away with another.”
Alyssia flinched. “He won?”
The widow inclined her head. “He won.”
“He won,” she repeated, as though saying it aloud might make sense of this whole situation. The words, however, tasted like ash.
“Is that not a good thing?” Mrs. Dove-Lyon asked. “After all, it’s better to wed someone with history than a stranger.”
Her fingers curled at her sides. Perhaps, but the man here today might as well have been a stranger. More than a decade had passed since she’d last spoken a single word to him. She had changed over the years, so it was only natural for him to have changed as well. “I suppose he eclipses the others in some ways.”
“And he’s much more stubborn,” Mrs. Dove-Lyon added. “In my experience, stubborn men make for the best partners, or the worst, depending on one’s temperament.”
They had that in common. “What was in those drinks?” Alyssia asked, somewhat concerned.
“That, my dear, I cannot divulge.”
Of course.
“He looks rather well for a man who’s been drinking poison,” Mrs. Dove-Lyon observed.
Poison. It shouldn’t be deadly, should it? A sound between a laugh and a scoff escaped her. “Then I pity the poison.”
The widow chuckled softly. “Would you like a moment to compose yourself before I send him over?”
“No need. I don’t need composing.” The lie quivered on her tongue, so she drew a steadying breath. It was however, better to get the reunion over with as soon as possible and not drag this miserable feeling out. “He’s simply a man.”
