Diana’s lips parted. She had not expected tenderness from him, but some stubborn part of her had still expected compassion. A trace of shame. Instead, he gave herthat.
“Am I?” she asked, and her hazel eyes burned now, fixed on him with a brightness that was too near tears. “You looked at me, touched me, kissed me, held me, shared my bed, listened while I spoke to you as though youwantedto gain my trust, all while knowing you remembered, and I am the one being dramatic?”
His hand tightened around the glass. “It changed nothing.”
“It changed everything.”
Her voice rang through the room, and for the first time, he flinched, his eyes narrowing.
Diana took a step toward him before she could stop herself, hurt pushing her where pride would have held her back. “Why did you not tell me?”
His expression hardened. “Because it was not your business.”
The room went silent. For one monstrous moment, she simply stared at him, unable to breathe properly. As though all those evenings, all those glances, all those murmured words in the darkness, all those careful moments in which she had begun to think this man might choose her, had been nothing more than an inconvenience.
“My business?” she repeated softly. “My business?”
He set the glass down with more force this time. “Do not make this into something it is not.”
She stared at him with a kind of horrified wonder. “And what, precisely, is it not?”
He exhaled sharply, impatience flashing. “I remembered. I had no wish to discuss it before I understood the whole of what happened to me. That is all.”
“No wish.” She tasted the words like poison. “Of course. A discussion with your wife would have been an inconvenience.”
“That is enough.”
“No.” The word tore from her, low and shaking. “No, it is not enough, Alexander. You do not get to become cold and distant and imagine that I shall simply stand here and accept it becausenowit suits you to shut me out. I have already done that once.”
Something flickered in his face then. His eyes moved over her for a fraction too long, as though the sight of her unsettled him in ways he did not wish to examine.
For one miserable instant, her body answered that gaze anyway. She hated it. Hated the way he still filled the room. Hated the way his nearness still made her skin aware, made her chest ache, made memory rise against her will.
The man who cared for her had not existed. She felt sick.
His voice dropped lower. “I shall leave once I find out what happened.”
There it was.
For a second, she did not understand the words, though she heard them clearly. They floated toward her one by one and then assembled themselves into meaning with slow, merciless finality.
Her pulse stumbled.
He continued, each word cutting, controlled, the very model of the cold Duke of Rosewood she had once learned to despise. “I mean to know who attacked me and why. Once I have the truth, there will be no further reason for me to remain in London.”
Diana could not move.
She had known better. She had known this could happen. She had told herself, again and again, that the warmth in him belonged to his forgetting, that memory would turn him back into the man who had abandoned her without a backward glance.
And now he stood before her and proved her right so thoroughly that the triumph of it was unbearable.
“When,” she asked, and her voice sounded distant to her own ears, “did you decide that I was no longer worth the truth? Was it the moment you remembered, or was I merely useful until then?”
His expression tightened. “Do not put words into my mouth.”
“I have no need to. You have said enough.”
He took a step toward her then. The movement only made the tears burn hotter behind her eyes. “Diana?—”
