If he chose.
“Your faith in my judgment upon such short acquaintance is very touching, Miss Wylde. But ‘falling in love,’ as you put it, is hardly necessary for a successful marriage.”
He could sense in the silence that followed a number of things she was tempted to say.
He wondered which ones she was discarding.
“It is so generous of you to share your expertise on the subject of love. Perhaps you ought to write a book on it as well.”
“If I feel that life has gotten dull for want of suffering, I shall certainly do that.”
He could sense her smiling.
He finally signed his name with a flourish and reached for the sander.
“Do you miss your wife?”
He went still.
Then he pulled his arm slowly away from the sander and straightened. A quick flame of anger flickered, a certain reflexive imperious resentment at being so deftly cornered.
Hewasa bloody castle.
And she, like a wildflower, had been seeking out the chinks between the stones from the beginning.
To what end?
But of course he knew.
He ought to stop it now.
Her gaze was steady. But she hadn’t his years of expertise with cold inscrutability. He found himself unaccountably moved by the cant of her chin; it betrayed a little uncertainty of her own presumption. She was poised to turn her question into a jest should he decide to deflect it.
Odd to think of her as an innocent, this girl who’d willfully taken a lover. In many ways she was.
He fiercely disliked the realization that, in some ways, at the age of forty-three... so was he.
Not only that, but possibly also a little awkward.
He was buffeted between two things: what he knew were the right things to do and say, and where he, the ruthless strategist, could lead this conversation if he so chose. Which was to the room adjacent, where a bed was.
He found himself turning slightly away, toward the window. The water seemed a safer view than her green eyes. He told himself that she’d asked a question, and he owed her an answer.
This was, after all, their bargain.
His breathing seemed too audible suddenly.
Two breaths were all he allowed himself before he answered.
“At the time of my wife’s death,” he said, carefully, the words maneuvering around the forces of reason that attempted to stop them, “we had not lived together for nearly eight years. She was the daughter of a viscount. She preferred the city, near her family. I preferred the country. I was often away on campaign during our marriage. I have reasonto believe she was satisfied with the arrangement. And I . . .” He gave a small, humorless smile. “I confess that I was, too.”
It was unlike him to cushion bald truths. But this one, he knew, would ring brutally in the quiet room:
He didn’t miss his wife.
He wasn’t going to say that out loud.
He didn’t want to say it because he couldn’t anticipate how Miss Wylde’s expression would change, because of a certainty it would. He didn’t think he would ever forget the muffled anguish in her voice when she’d spoken of the duel, as though she hadn’t mattered at all to them. It had been yet another offhand, crushing erasure of a woman by a man.
