Page 118 of The Earl She Once Saved

“I kept one fact from you.”

“One fact?” she scoffed. “Only the return of my husband. Only the loss of everything I have worked to save.”

“I was trying to prevent that loss.”

“By making arrangements with the man who caused it.”

He shook his head. “I made no arrangement with him.”

“How should I know?”

Her question wounded him more deeply than she could have known. Rafe stared at her. Verity’s anger faltered, but she did not take the words back.

He looked toward the scattered drawings. “And did those provide the proof you wanted?”

“No.”

“What did they provide?”

Her breath caught. Rafe knew he should not ask. He wanted the answer with an intensity that made him reckless. Verity looked at the portrait upon the desk.

“The knowledge that you did not forget me.”

The room seemed to narrow around them.

Rafe’s heartbeat became heavy and uneven. “I never said I had.”

“You allowed me to believe it.”

“What should I have told you? That I spent years drawing a woman whose name I did not know?”

“You knew enough to remember my face.”

“I remembered many things from the war.”

“Did you draw them like this?”

Her hand touched the portrait. One finger rested beside the younger version of her mouth. Rafe looked at that finger and remembered it against his palm.

“No,” he admitted.

The answer changed the air between them. Neither moved. They were standing too near. He did not remember closing the distance. Verity’s face was flushed, her eyes bright with anger and something far more dangerous. The pulse beat rapidly at the hollow of her throat, just above his mother’s pendant. His gaze dropped to it. Verity saw.

Her breath became as uneven as his own. He wanted to touch the stone. He wanted to place his fingers beneath it and feel the living warmth of her skin. He wanted to tell her that every portrait was nothing beside the woman who now stood before him.

My brother’s wife.

The words came like a command shouted across a battlefield, and all he could do was stay away, not because he particularly cared about Roland, but exactly because he cared about her.

Rafe stepped back. He needed to be gone before she saw more of him than she already had. He reached for the nearest cold thing and held to it.

“I must make myself ready.”

Verity blinked. “For what?”

“I am calling upon Miss Marchmont this afternoon.”

He watched the meaning reach her. The color remained high in her face, but the uncertain warmth vanished from her eyes. Rafe hated himself. He could have stopped. Instead, he fitted another piece of armor over the first.