“Much better.” Rees’s voice radiated warmth that sent pleasure through her. She heard the soft clink of crystal; he was pouring drinks, likely that Scottish whisky Rafe favored. “God, Rafe, I was a complete fool those first weeks.”
“You were angry,” Rafe replied. His words sounded heavy with the weight of past conversations that she tried to forget.
“I was an ass.” The self-recrimination in Rees’s voice urged her to push open the door, to tell him he had more than made amends, but he continued. “Victoria is... she is remarkable. Witty, intelligent, kind. Being with her is easy, natural, like breathing. When she laughs at something I have said, when she gets that particular gleam in her eye while dismantling my arguments about commodity prices—” He paused, and she heard him set down his glass. “I find myself inventing reasons to be near her. Yesterday, I spent twenty minutes pretending to read the same page just to stay in the morning room while she worked on her correspondence.”
Heat flooded Victoria’s cheeks, her heart swelling. He had been pretending to read? She had noticed his unusual stillness, had almost asked if he needed tea. To know he had simply wanted her company, that his presence had not been coincidence but intention—
“You are falling for her,” Rafe observed, satisfaction lacing his tone.
“I am.” The admission came without hesitation, firm and certain. “Perhaps I already have. Christ, Rafe, this marriage I never wanted has become the best thing in my life.”
Victoria pressed her fingers to her lips, trapping a small sound that wanted to escape. He was falling for her. The words resonated within her, a perfect moment of joy.
“Even though you were trapped into it?” Rafe asked, his tone curious rather than judgmental.
“Especially because of that.” Rees’s voice grew thoughtful. “If I had chosen conventionally, I might have picked wrong. Some pretty debutante with nothing behind her eyes, someone who would bore me within a month. But fate or Bessie’s machinations gave me exactly who I needed. Someone who challenges me, who makes me think.”
The joy in Victoria’s chest twisted, sharpened, and began to transform into something else entirely. Trapped. He had saidtrapped. She had carried the guilt of that fact every day. Yet hearing him acknowledge it so plainly made her stomach clench with shame.
“Do you think Victoria knows?” Rafe asked carefully. “That you did not enter that wager willingly?”
The world seemed to slow around those words. Victoria’s hand found the doorframe, fingers gripping the wood as her knees felt uncertain.
“About being drunk? About not understanding what ‘traditional stakes’ meant?” Rees sighed, the sound heavy with old frustration. “What would be the point of telling her now? It would only hurt her to know I stumbled into that game confused and intoxicated. She already carries enough guilt.”
Victoria’s grip on the doorframe was the only thing keeping her upright as the weight of understanding crashed over her. He had not known. Had not willingly entered that cursed wager at all.
She had thought—God, she had thought he had at least chosen to gamble, had walked into the Lyon’s Den of his own accord, had accepted the challenge with full knowledge, even if he had not known about the rigged riddle. But he had been drunk. Confused. He had agreed to something without comprehension, just as she had been lured to that garden without understanding Damian’s true intentions.
“I thought I was being clever,” Rees continued. “Traditional stakes—I assumed it meant standard monetary wagers. By the time I sobered enough to understand what I had agreed to, it was too late. The contract was binding.”
The parallel was too perfect, too horrible. They had both been trapped by their ignorance and circumstances beyond their control. But she had her own desperate reasons. She had faced social ruin, her family’s destruction. While Rees—Rees had simply made a drunken mistake, and she had destroyed his life for it.
Every kindness he had shown her these past weeks took on new meaning. Not affection but duty masquerading as care. Not genuine warmth but a good man making the best of an impossible situation. He loved her, perhaps, but it was the love of a prisoner for the only companionship available, not the free choice of a man who had selected his bride.
Her vision blurred, the hallway swimming as tears burned behind her eyes. She released the doorframe slowly, each finger lifted to avoid making sound, and began backing away. Her slippers whispered against the carpet, each step measured despite her frantic heart.
“She seems happier lately,” Rafe said, his voice growing fainter as Victoria retreated.
“She is,” Rees agreed, warmth evident even at a distance. “We both are. Perhaps that is enough—building something good from something that began so badly.”
But it was not enough. Not when she knew the truth. Not when every smile he offered, every tender touch, was built on the foundation of her theft. She had stolen his freedom, and she had been too cowardly to tell him the truth about his own entrapment.
She reached her chambers on legs that barely held her, dismissing her startled maid with a gesture before the girl could speak. The door closed with a soft click, and then—finally alone—Victoria sank to the floor, her skirts pooling around her.
The sobs came in great, wrenching gasps, grief not for herself but for him—for Rees, who deserved so much better than a wife who had trapped him, who had stolen his choices. She pressed her palms against her mouth, trying to muffle the sounds, but they escaped anyway, raw and necessary.
He had fallen for her, but only because she had left him no other option. And that, more than anything Damian had done, more than society’s censure, was the sin she would never be able to forgive herself for.
Chapter 14
The candles flickered across the dinner table, their light illuminating the untouched portions on Victoria’s plate, the roasted fowl she had merely rearranged, the vegetables she had separated but not consumed, and the wine that remained at the same level it had been poured. Rees watched her push a piece of potato from one side of the plate to the other, her movements mechanical, her gaze fixed on the task as though it required her complete concentration.
“The Ashfords’ ball is next week,” he ventured, trying once more to draw her into conversation as he had every evening for the past four days. “Your mother wrote that she would like us to attend together.”
“That would be appropriate,” Victoria replied, her voice polite but distant, as if responding to a stranger’s inquiry about the weather. She did not look up, did not elaborate, and did not tease him about his tendency to hide in the card room at such events as she would have just a week ago.
The silence that followed pressed against his chest. This was not the comfortable quiet they had learned to share, where understanding flowed between them without speech. This was the suffocating silence of the early weeks, when every moment had been edged with resentment and regret.
