She paused. “I did not have the luxury of romantic consideration.”
He felt irritation stir at the absent version of himself who had apparently engineered such a situation. The more he considered it, the more the idea displeased him. What sort ofman abandoned his wife for a year and expected her to remain politely unchanged?
He held her gaze across the table. “You could have taken a lover.”
Her eyes flashed at once, the hazel brightening with offended heat. “You gave me permission to do so.”
“And did you?” His voice dropped slightly, the calmness in it edged now with something harder.
He leaned forward a fraction, resting one forearm against the table as his gaze searched her face with unsettling intensity.
She did not answer immediately. Instead, she set down her fork and folded her hands neatly in her lap, as though the matter required a moment’s consideration.
The pause scraped against Alexander’s composure.
Something sharp and unwelcome tightened low in his chest. Why the hesitation? The thought arrived before he could stop it. Had there been someone? Some gentleman who had stepped conveniently into the vacancy he himself had created? The notion irritated him in a way he could not quite justify, but it lingered nonetheless, like grit beneath the skin.
He watched her closely, his gaze narrowing slightly. “Well?”
“I did not,” she said at last.
Satisfaction moved through him as he leaned back, the fine linen of his shirt straining against his shoulders. He studied the seriousness of her face, her chocolate-colored hair, her bright, hazel eyes.
“You remained faithful to a man who abandoned you,” he stated.
Diana’s chin lifted, the diamonds at her throat catching the candlelight. “I remained faithful to my name, Your Grace. The reputation of a Duchess is not something I trade for pleasure. Or petty vengeance.”
He watched her carefully then, and all her perfect, rigid composure; the way she held her silver as if it were a weapon; the miles-wide distance she maintained across the table. She was protecting herself from him.
“You believe I will become that man again,” he said, his voice dropping low.
She met his gaze, her hazel eyes clashing with his emerald ones. The honesty in her expression was a physical blow. “Yes. I am waiting for the moment you remember that you despise the suffocating requirements of a wife.”
The bluntness of it startled him, but it only stoked the fire behind his ribs.
“And until then,” she continued, her voice gaining a desperate kind of strength, “it would be prudent for our interactions to remain strictly formal. For your own sake. You will find your footing more easily if we maintain the boundaries of the contract you so highly prized.”
He considered the word.Prudent.It meant distance, detachment. The very qualities she claimed had defined the man who left her.
He shook his head. “I do not believe restraint will restore my memory, Diana. In fact, I suspect it will only serve to keep me a stranger in my own life.”
“Perhaps,” she replied, her fingers ghosting over the stem of her glass. “But it will preserve clarity.”
He didn’t look at her eyes; he studied her mouth as she spoke. He remembered the softness of it from the night before, the way it had yielded, the way it had tasted of wine and surrender just before her pride had forced her to shove him away.
Clarity was the last thing he wanted.
“You may, in fact, be the only remedy I require,” he said, his voice lowering more until it was a velvet rasp.
Diana stilled, her entire body going rigid. “Do not.”
“If my mind refuses to cooperate,” he continued, ignoring her protest as he let his gaze rake over her with unashamed, alpha possessiveness, “I am confident that a more… visceral approach might prove effective. The body often remembers what the mind chooses to discard.”
Her breath hitched, her chest rising and falling rapidly beneath the lace of her bodice.
“I have noticed, Diana,” he continued. He let his gaze linger on the pulse thrumming frantically in her neck. “That, for all your talk of formal interactions, you do not retreat when I approach. You bristle. You argue. And yet, you remain in the room. You remained in the greenhouse today when you could have fled the moment you saw me.”
“That is circumstance,” she replied, her voice tight with a humiliation she couldn’t hide. “I was simply… caught off guard.”
