Page 80 of The Duchess Games

And pulled out the letter sealed with his crest from inside her stays.

“Care to explain this?”

Chapter Thirty-One

She had always known this moment would come.

Of course, she had.

She assumed she would feel regret, sorrow, shame.

And she did. But the panic was a surprise. It welled in her chest, more fear and anxiety than a hundred revenue men might cause. “Callum.”

“You lied to me.”

She couldn’t argue. But she might make him understand. If she was very, very lucky. If he was willing to listen.

He did not look particularly willing to listen.

There was menace to his cold anger, to the taut lines of his body, the betrayal in his pale eyes, pinning her. It wasn’t the power of a duke, but the simmering force of a man betrayed.

“You played me for a fool, Madam.”

“I didn’t,” she insisted. “It wasn’t like that.”

“You don’t deny you used my seal?”

“No.”

He barked a laugh, but it was cold, harsh. “There’s that at least.”

She wanted to give the letter back. Give them all back. But she couldn’t. The women who had risked everything for her and would continue to risk everything deserved to know that she could protect them.

“I did it for the village. I haven’t used it. And it’s nothing that would malign you in any way.”

The disdain was clear in the angle of his glare, the set of his jaw. She was watching him turn back into a marble statue.

“What would you do if your sister was hungry? Both my siblings need me.”

“Like a fool, I admired you.” He ran his hand through his hair. It fell right back into tousled lines. The hair of a duke, not a mere mortal. “All these years, I thought you made me a better person.”

“I—”

“But you’re just like all the others, aren’t you? Playacting for a duke.”

She flinched. She knew how that would cut him.

“It wasn’t like that.” She had to make him understand that much at least. Nothing that had passed between them was part of this. It had nothing to do with smuggling or contraband or stolen rings. But she had always known, deep down, that he wasn’t for her. That she could not be a smuggler and a duchess. Never a duchess. But she couldn’t let him think he meant nothing. Not when he meant everything. “Callum, I lov–”

His voice was the cold lash of rain at the windowpane.

“Don’t.”

“But–”

“No.” She’d never heard anything more final. It was ice closing over a pond. She saw it in the blue of his eyes, going cold and gray. “When you said those words to me in the library that night,” he continued putting the pieces of the puzzle together. “Those letters were in your dress, weren’t they?”

She nodded mutely.