“As a friend.” The answer came without hesitation.
His mouth hardened. “You keep saying that as though it makes it harmless.”
“It should have.”
Strained silence fell between them then. Diana could feel him slipping farther from the surface charm she had once known. Beneath all his careful insistence, there was temper now, an impatience deepening like storm color.
He said, lower, “I would never have left you.”
The words entered her like a needle. Because for one treacherous instant, against her will, Alexander’s face rose in her mind.
Alexander, before the memory returned, with that devastating, awakened hunger in his green eyes, with his hand warm and sure at her waist, with his mouth lowering to hers as though he had every intention of teaching her what it meant to be wanted. Alexander, who had held her in bed with a tenderness so dangerous, she had begun to forget that it was temporary.Alexander, who had then turned cold, and proved her worst fear right.
She hated that even now, with Martin opposite her and danger closing in, it was Alexander she thought of.
Alexander’s broad shoulders filled a doorway. Alexander’s dark, rough voice at her ear. Alexander’s hands, capable of infuriating gentleness and ruin in equal measure.
Alexander, who had wounded her more deeply than any man alive and who still, despite all of that, remained the first place her frightened heart turned.
Martin saw something change in her face and mistook it.
“You see?” he said quickly, leaning nearer. “You know I speak truth.”
“No,” Diana said, and her voice shook now, though not from surrender. “I know only that you are not the man I believed you to be.”
His expression went utterly still. “Do not say that.”
“It is true.” The words came more easily now, propelled by revulsion, by grief, by the final cracking of an old trust. “The man I knew would never have done this. He would never have spoken of Georgina this way. He would never have dragged me from myhome and then told me I ought to be grateful for it. He would never have looked at me and seen a thing to be won.”
“I am trying to save you.”
“From what? From my own choices?”
“From him.”
The answer came with such naked fury that for one sharp second, she saw the full depth of it. Resentment. Obsession. Wounded vanity nursed until it had rotted into madness.
“You are not saving me from Alexander,” she said. “You are punishing me because I did not love you the way you wished.”
Martin’s nostrils flared. “He has poisoned you against me.”
“No.” She leaned forward too then, unable to stop herself, the horror and betrayal in her giving rise to a clarity she had not felt in days. “You have done that all on your own.”
Before he could answer, before either of them could move again, the carriage lurched so violently that Diana was thrown sideways against the squabs, one hand flying out to brace herself.
The horses screamed. Wood creaked. Wheels ground harshly against gravel, and then everything stopped with such abrupt force that the silence afterward rang in her ears.
Martin swore. “What?—”
He had not even finished the word when another sound split the air outside: the sharp thunder of a horse having cut across the road at speed, the crack of harness, the harsh command of a man’s voice.
Then heavy footsteps.
Diana’s breath caught in her throat.
Every nerve in her body seemed to leap toward the sound before her mind could keep pace with it. She knew that stride.
The door was wrenched open.
