She would not give him the satisfaction of watching her panic. She knew he was waiting for it.
He was waiting to see her break and fold and reach for him in helplessness, all breathless fear and dependence. The thought alone stiffened something in her. She had been afraid before, on her wedding day, and the long year Alexander left her to weather silence and gossip alone. She had been afraid when her parents passed away. But this fear was different. This was madness wrapped in affection.
Diana turned her head slightly and glanced toward the window, forcing herself to look rather than merely react. The city had disappeared entirely now. Only open road, fields washed pale beneath the weak afternoon light, bare hedgerows, and the occasional skeletal tree. The carriage rolled onward with dreadful steadiness.
Screaming would do nothing. There was no one near enough to hear, and even if there had been, Martin had already shown her that he was not frightened by scandal, by impropriety, by any line a reasonable man would not cross. Reason had departed him long before she entered this carriage.
She turned back slowly, refusing the temptation to shrink from him.
“By what right,” she asked, and was startled by how steady her voice sounded, “do you imagine you may decide what is good for me?”
Martin’s expression did not alter. That was somehow the worst part. He looked certain, and that certainty was more chilling than frenzy would have been.
“By the right of loving you better than he ever could,” he replied.
The words struck her with such force that for one moment she nearly forgot her fear in sheer disbelief. Every time he said love, something inside her recoiled. Love was not this tightening sense of enclosure, not this sickening conviction that her life and will and future might be seized.
“You do not love me,” she said quietly.
He smiled then, but there was no warmth in it. “You say that because you are confused.”
“No,” she replied, more sharply now, “I say it because I know the difference between affection and possession.”
A flicker passed across his face, quick as the shadow of a bird over water, and she knew she had struck something true.
“You are overwrought,” he said, the gentleness returning to his tone with a strained effort that only made the edge beneath it more apparent. “You have been living under his influence too long. He has hurt you, then turned you against the people who truly care for you. It will take time for you to see clearly again.”
Diana stared at him.
There was such complete arrogance in the words that it almost steadied her, because beneath fear and disgust, something else began to rise, a feeling that made blood rush to her head and her hands tremble.
“You speak,” she said, each word placed with care, “as though I have no mind of my own.”
“You do have a mind of your own, Diana. It is one of the reasons I have always adored you. But…” Martin leaned forward slightly, his gaze fixed on hers with dreadful intimacy. “…you are also a woman who has been manipulated, bartered, neglected, and then dazzled by the first scraps of attention that brute chose to throw your way. You do not understand your own heart just now. Later, when you are away from him, when all of this has settled, you will thank me.”
Her stomach turned.
The carriage jolted over a rut, throwing a brief, violent shudder through the compartment, but Martin did not look away. His eyes remained on her as though he could will agreement from her by force of patience alone.
Thank me.The audacity of it might have been laughable if she had not been trapped with him.
“Do you hear yourself?” The words scraped her throat as she spoke them, and she had to swallow to keep herself from trembling. “Do you truly hear what you are saying?”
“I hear the truth.”
“You hear only yourself.”
His jaw tightened.
Diana drew in a slow breath, though her pulse still hammered mercilessly. She had to keep him talking. She knew that instinctively now. So long as he was talking, he was not acting. So long as he was building fantasies aloud, he was not yet forced to confront the fact that she would not step obediently into them.
“You think this will make me love you?” she asked. “That carrying me away like stolen property, speaking of your wife as though she were a coat you may shrug off when it no longer suits you? Deciding my future for me will somehow awaken gratitude?”
“Not gratitude,” Martin said. “Recognition.”
She nearly laughed, and perhaps something in her face suggested it, because his expression darkened at once.
“You did care for me,” he pressed, as though he could not bear even this part of the truth slipping from his grasp. “You must have. You trusted me. You turned to me. You smiled at me when he abandoned you. You let me remain near you.”
