CHAPTER 1
“Now that the deed is done, I shall be leaving,” the Duke of Rosewood looked her up and down and nodded with businesslike approval.
Diana did not at first understand what he meant. She stood perfectly still in the center of the grand entrance hall of her new husband’s London townhouse, unable to make even the smallest movement.
She was still gloved, still wrapped in ivory silk and pearls, still carrying the warmth of congratulations and clinking glasses from the wedding breakfast that had concluded scarcely half an hour ago.
The air in the hall felt insufficient. She drew a deep breath, yet it did not satisfy.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked evenly, though the steadiness cost her.
The words scraped at the back of her throat. Her pulse began to pound in a sharp, insistent rhythm that made her voice feel thinner than she intended. She could feel her heartbeat distinctly beneath the pearls resting against her collarbone, each thud pushing faintly against her skin.
The Duke stood before her in dark tailoring that fit him too well. The coat followed the breadth of his shoulders, shaping itself to strength that seemed carved. The wool stretched smooth across his chest, unmoved by tension or doubt. She found herself watching the slow rise and fall of that chest.
It was unfair how composed he looked.
The pale afternoon sunlight traced the hard line of his jaw and caught faintly in his emerald eyes when he finally lifted them to her. When those eyes settled on her, her body reacted before her pride could intervene. Heat moved low and immediately through her abdomen, startling in its intensity.
“I married you,” he said finally, folding the gloves neatly into his palm. “The obligation has been fulfilled. You will remain here. I shall not.”
The statement struck her so abruptly that her lungs faltered mid-inhalation.
The faint crease between his brows deepened.
“Not… remain here?” she asked, and the question felt misshapen in her mouth, a clumsy thing that didn’t belong between them.
She swallowed, the lingering sweetness of champagne turning to ash on her tongue.
“Yes. I am leaving,” he said, and his words were a flat, dead thing.
Diana felt the sudden, cruel weight of her finery, her bodice suddenly becoming too tight, the pearls at her collar tightening with every thud.
For a fleeting, disorienting second, she was no longer in the hall but standing smaller, younger, listening to the same tone of dismissal, the same cold certainty that she was to be left behind and expected to endure it without complaint.
She braced her knees until they ached, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her sway.
“Tonight?” she whispered, trying to hide the plea between her words, the fear of what a life as a deserted wife would be.
“Yes.”
“On our wedding day?”
“Yes.”
Each response arrived with the same terrifying lack of vibration. No heat. No regret. Just a decision made in a room she hadn’t been invited to enter.
If he had flayed her with an accusation—if he had burned with the fire of a man wronged—she could have found her footing in the heat. But this was ice cold.
The rustle of her skirts as she shifted sounded like a roar in the vacuum of his silence. She stayed pinned under his gaze, shivering from the sudden, absolute realization that she was entirely alone in the room.
“You cannot be serious,” she said, stepping toward him before she had consciously decided to move.
The movement sent a rush of warmth through her limbs. The closer she came, the more acutely she felt him, and the contained strength in his stance, the faint scent of clean linen and something darker beneath it, something distinctly masculine that reached her before she could steel herself against it.
“We have been married scarcely an hour.”
“And that hour suffices,” he responded.
