“No.” She stepped back, and the word came sharp and trembling. “Do not say my name as though you still have any right to soothe me.”
He went still. The fire crackled behind him.
When she spoke again, her voice was lower, more terrible for being calm. “I was a fool.”
His jaw hardened. “You know nothing of what this has cost me.”
She laughed again, and this time the sound broke. “And you know nothing of what it has cost me to believe you.”
That landed. She saw it in the briefest fracture around his eyes. She wanted him to cross the room, to take her face in his hands, to tell her she was wrong. But he said nothing.
Diana’s throat ached with the effort of swallowing around it. She looked at him and saw both men now. The husband who had made her blush and burn and soften despite herself. The Duke, who had left her on her wedding day and would leave her againas soon as his own purposes were served. She did not know which vision hurt more.
“I hate that I was right,” she whispered.
A muscle flickered in his jaw. “Diana?—”
But she was already turning away, because if she stayed another moment, she might disgrace herself utterly and break in front of him. He had not earned the sight of that. Her heart felt too large for her chest. She crossed the room with as much dignity as she could gather, though each step seemed to split her open afresh.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
She stopped with her hand on the door, but did not turn.
“Away from you,” she said, and her voice shook despite all her efforts to steady it.
Then she opened the door.
The corridor beyond was cooler, darker, impossibly quiet. She stepped into it, and only once the door had closed behind her did the first tear finally slip free, warm and humiliating against her cheek. She brushed it away at once, almost violently.
Diana kept walking, her spine straight, her head high, though it felt as though every soft, foolish dream she had not meant tonurture had been crushed beneath the heel of the same man who had first taught her how it felt to be wanted.
CHAPTER 24
“Take it away,” Diana said, before the maid had even finished pouring the tea, and the sharpness in her own voice startled her less than the fact that she no longer cared whether it startled anyone else. “No, leave it. I beg your pardon. Leave it there.”
The maid froze beside the small table, her eyes widening for one brief, guilty instant before she lowered her gaze again. “Yes, Your Grace.”
Diana pressed her fingertips to her temple and shut her eyes for a moment that felt far too much like surrender.
“You may go,” she said more quietly, hating herself a little for the abruptness, hating him most of all for turning every harmless domestic moment into a fresh humiliation.
It had only been a week since she had stood in his study and watched the warmth she had begun to trust vanish from his face.Only a week since he had looked at her with that old coldness and informed her that she had been foolish enough to mistake borrowed tenderness for permanence.
And yet the week had stretched like a season.
The maid slipped away.
The door closed, and Diana stood alone in the pale morning light of her private sitting room, the untouched breakfast tray laid out before her with absurd elegance, as though beauty and silver and fresh jam could remedy the fact that she could no longer meet his eyes.
No longer taking meals together had been her own decision, or so she told herself, though it had hardly required declaration. After that night, they had moved around each other like enemies confined to the same battlefield, determined to survive without offering the other the satisfaction of injury.
She knew how to survive without him, but the trouble was that for a little while, she had ceased to want to.
That was the most wretched part of it.
No matter how fiercely she tried to preserve her anger, her body continued to remember him with a loyalty her pride found despicable. There were unwanted moments, when she would pause at a window and think of the breadth of his chest beneath her palm, the way his green eyes had darkened when he wantedher. The recollection would move low and hot through her with such traitorous intimacy that she wanted to throw something breakable merely to hear another sound besides the one her heart kept making when his name crossed her mind.
By noon, Diana had thrown herself so thoroughly into her duchess duties that even the servants had begun to relax, reassured by her calm efficiency. If only they knew how fragile it was.
