His gaze sharpened, and his voice went cold. “I call it prudence. What occurred in the training hall was an error. I allowed myself to forget what is proper—to forget the distance that must exist between us. I am correcting that.”
“By pretending I am not here?”
“By maintaining boundaries.”
“Boundaries.” The word left her like a blade drawn. “You kissed me, Your Grace. You did not merely brush my hand in a dance. You pressed me against a wall and took liberties you have not the right to pretend you did not enjoy. Do not speak to me of boundaries as though I am the only one who crossed them.”
Colour rose in his cheeks—quick, unmistakable. The sight was both satisfying and cruel, and she hated that she felt either.
“That is precisely my point.” He turned away, back to the window, as if the landscape offered safer company than she did. “I forgot myself. I behaved in a manner unbecoming a gentleman, and I—”
“You felt something.”
Silence.
Fiona crossed the room until she stood behind him, close enough to see the tightness in his shoulders, the strain in the way he held himself as though refusing to move were the only form of control left to him.
“That is what troubles you,” she said softly. “Not that you kissed me. Not even that you touched me. But that you wished to. That you still do.” Her voice lowered, intimate despite herself. “That you cannot look at me without remembering.”
“Miss Hart.” His tone was taut, restrained to the point of pain. “I am asking you, as a gentleman, to leave.”
“And I am refusing, as a woman who is quite finished with being sent away.”
He turned.
She had prepared herself for anger, for hauteur, for that careful detachment he wore like armour. She had not prepared for the anguish in his eyes—bare and fierce, the look of a man fighting a battle he did not believe he could win.
“You do not understand,” he said, and the words sounded as though they cost him something. “You think this is about propriety—about society, convention, what is and is not done. It is not. It is aboutyou.”
“Me?”
“You are—” He stopped, as though the truth choked him, then forced it through. “You are the first person in my adult life who has looked at me without recoil. The first who has touched me as though I were something other than a monster to be endured. The first who has made me want—” His voice roughened. “Want things I had long since convinced myself were not for me.”
“Then why—”
“Because I will ruin it.” His voice cracked, not theatrically, but like a man at the edge of something he cannot name. “I will ruin you. I have spent eight-and-twenty years being told I am cursed, unwanted, unfit for decent company. I learned solitude because solitude is safe—because alone I cannot disappoint, cannot wound anyone, cannot watch the moment their kindness turns to pity… or worse.”
Fiona stared at him—this impossible, infuriating man who had carried her through a storm, kept vigil at her bedside, kissed her as though he had been starving, and now stood before her offering his deepest fear as though it were a law of nature.
“You are a coward,” she said.
His head lifted sharply, as though she had struck him.
“You heard me.” She stepped closer, driven by something fierce and reckless, something that would not be soothed by fine manners. “Not because you are afraid—we are all afraid—but because you let fear decide everything. You have chosen loneliness and named it virtue. You have built walls around yourself and then called them protection.”
“You do not know—”
“I know what you have shown me.” Her voice sharpened, steadied. “I know you carried me through rain and wind as though it cost you nothing, when it must have cost you a great deal. I know you sat by my bed through the night. I know you have been gentle when the world has offered you little but cruelty.” She was close enough now to see the quick pulse in his throat, the uneven breath he tried to master. “I know the man who kissed me three days ago was not a beast. He was a man—lonely and frightened, yes, but good—who has been told lies about himself for so long he has begun to accept them as truth.”
“Miss Hart—”
“Do not.” She lifted a hand, though it trembled only slightly. “Do not ask me to leave. Do not tell me this was an error. And do not stand there and claim indifference when it is written plainly upon your face.I see you, Your Grace. I see what this costs you.”
He moved before she could draw another breath.
One instant, she stood her ground, flushed with indignation; the next, his hand struck the bookshelf beside her head, palm flat against the wood, effectively caging her between his arm and the rows of leather-bound volumes. He did not touch her—not quite—but his body was close enough that the heat of him pressed in from every side.
His face hovered inches from hers. His breath came unevenly. His eyes burned.
