The knob winked like a blade.
And his ears rang as though she’d slammed it.
So he closed his eyes. All of his senses, in fact, suddenly felt raw and amplified, as if he’d sampled the wrong thing from Mr. Delacorte’s case and had awakened naked alongside a sleeping tiger.
He rubbed his forehead. He pulled his hand away and stared at it. It was trembling, as if he’d just done murder.
It’s how he knew he’d done the right thing for both of them regardless of how he, and she, felt now. He had learned it was always best to make a cut brutal and swift. There was no mercy in it otherwise.
He’d lately come to know that his very spirit was always contracted like a muscle to bear all of the things expected of him. He’d understood this the instant her radiant face had lifted to his in the parlor the day of the Italian composer. Because for that brief moment, for the first time in his life, his feet had simply not felt the ground.
Firmly rooted to earth again, accustomed territory where he would always have the lay of the land, he sat down and picked up his quill pen.
He dropped his forehead in his hand.
He couldn’t make the pen move. All he saw on that foolscap was the image of Mariana’s white, stunned face.
And it was this—the need, the attempt to think of anything else—that resulted in a few words. He wrote haltingly at first.
Then ever more concertedly.
And before the hour was out, he’d filled an entire, very surprising page, word after word emerging as if something had broken open inside him.
And thusly, at last, he began to tell the story of a life.
But not, his publisher would be chagrined to learn, the one he’d already lived.
In her room, she wept.
Only a little, and as quietly as she could. Palms pressed hard against eyes and mouth. Hot tears leaking through her fingers. Ribs aching from the blows of her stifled sobs. But she could bear this. Couldn’t she? It was just emotion; for heaven’s sake, if emotion was capable of killing her, it would have done it by now. And fury and embarrassment were practically part of every day in the typical opera career, weren’t they? Onstage and off. She ought to be able to manage that much without coming apart.
But grief was so much harder.
Grief was... hope’s ghost.
The grief was how she knew hope had taken up residence in her like a sneaky lodger. She did not dare give this hope a name or assign it an objective. She only knew definitively that it had been there, because now she was leaden and hollow with the disbelief that accompanies a death.
Hope. That was the gleaming thing she’d sensed on the horizon. It had borne her aloft. Like a cloud. It had sneaked in, despite her ramparts.
She felt like a fool. And worse than that: uncertain. She was suddenly forced to recast everything she thought she knew about herself in this discovery. Because a lot of new questions were begged. How much of what she considered her courage was merely bravado? How much of it was really... just herlyingto herself?
She could not afford to feel uncertain. She could not afford to miss a trick. Any emotional condition other than pragmatism was sheer luxury at this point in her life.
He was a bloody duke! What had she beenthinking? He could say and do very nearly anything he liked to anyone at any time, of course. And he was better at denying himself unwise things, and perhaps that was all to the best.
Surely he was right.
Because wasn’t the bastard always right?
It was just...
She was going to miss him.
And he, she knew, was going to miss her.
She sighed and pulled her palms away from her face. She took another few good, long breaths.
She found a handkerchief and dampened it in her basin, where the water was still cool, and gently dabbed at her eyes.
