He flinched when the bedclothes smacked him in the chest, lifted an eyebrow, his lips thinning beneath his flared nostrils.
“What’s wrong? Did I say something to upset you?” She didn’t turn. “Haven, what do you want from me? What more can I offer you?”
She turned then, her whole body shaking, her vision blurring with unshed tears. She leveled him with her gaze.
“A house? Dresses? Great sex? Why would I want any of those from you when I could get the very same things in 2025 without all the strings attached?” She didn’t want any of those things. She wanted him—she wanted his love. “You can keep it all.”
Even your heart.
A black look settled over his face. He tensed as he rose, unabashedly naked, from the bed.
“I knew it was a foolish idea the moment the words left my mouth. How could I have ever thought you, a low-class, vulgar, American whore, could be my duchess?”
She gasped as pain, sharp and heavy, plunged into her chest. He’d been asking her to be hiswife, not his mistress?
Oh no, what had she done? She had to make things right, she had to—wait, had he called her a low-class, vulgar, American whore?
Anger boiled, searing the words of apology right from the tip of her tongue, replacing them with words born of scorn and bitterness.
“You son of a bitch. Who in the hell do you think you are?”
“A duke,” he thundered.
Not a vulnerable, courageous, gentle, loving man. The man she loved with all her heart and soul. He was a duke.
Divinia’s words echoed through her mind, “You aren’t right for him, not worthy of him….”
The dagger in her chest sank deeper.
“I don’t give a damn if you’re a duke. You called me a whore, but I’ve never acted like one. I never once asked you for anything. I would have been happy to live in the woods in a cave with only grass to eat if it meant I wouldn’t owe you anything.” Despair flooded her, dousing the fire of indignation that gave her such bravado before. Now, she was empty. Broken. Her heart sputtered, her breaths shook, and she slumped her shoulders in defeat. “I just wanted to be with you. I just wanted you towantto be with me.” Gathering the last of her strength, she looked him in the eye. “I wanted you to love me,” she sobbed.
With her wordsstill hanging in the air like a sword above his heart, Logan watched dumbstruck as Haven fled from the room.
The clockon the mantel chimed half past three in the morning as Haven wiped the tears from her face for the hundredth time.
“Ugh!” Frustrated, she stomped her foot and cursed Perez for taking her from her home, plopping her in Logan’s pasture, and making her fall in love with a man so obsessed with the events of his past he couldn’t see a future with her.
Squelching the sob threatening to erupt, she pulled open the second drawer in her bureau and riffled through it for undergarments to pack.
She couldn’t keep rewashing the panties she’d brought with her; they’d fall to pieces, so she’d have to make do with the cotton torture devices Millie had ordered for her.
Hurriedly packing whatever she could fit inside her gym bag, she just barely held back a sob.
She had to leave.
When the evening began, she’d prepared her heart to walk away and leave the pain of rejection behind her. She wanted to find some place low-key but safe where she could interrogate Perez and figure out how to get home. She was prepared to pack it in and hand the win off to Logan. But when he arrived in the room, he’d seen her, and his whole being responded to her. The glimmer of hope she’d been strangling in her soul wiggled free. Maybe she’d finally found the man who could love her, and it only took time-traveling back two hundred and eight years to find him. She was ready to bow before Perez and thank him and his goddesses for bringing her and Logan together.
But now she wanted to throw the watch into the nearest volcano, and sneer as it sank beneath the molten waves. But she couldn’t do it. Despite how much she despised Perez and theTres Deae, she needed them to get home.
She hated it.
She wanted to despise Logan. He was another man who’d taken something precious, used it, and threw it aside as if it meant nothing. As ifshewas nothing.
Her curse echoed in the empty room, and she continued filling her gym bag with anything she could use. She’d thrown plain dresses, boots, hair pins and combs, and her own twenty-first-century clothes and toiletries haphazardly into the bag.
Reaching for the next drawer, she steeled her mind to complete the task she’d been putting off for the last hour—touching the watch.
Taking a deep breath, she opened the drawer, prepared for the argument Perez would instigate, but when she pulled the cloth back from where she’d hidden it, it was gone.
