One more time.
See what you can get away with.
Laugh tomorrow morning. Tell him his manipulations fell flat.
Be the puppet master. Pull his strings.
Call it payback.
Cry later for the mess you’ve made of things.
“I don’t—” want to. I want him but I don’t want what this means.
“Yes, my darling, you do.” He pulls back, his expression as blank and as expressionless as a mask. “You’ve told anyone who’ll listen you’re with him,” he utters as he jerkily straightens his cuffs. “Who’s to deny it? Well, apart from me?”
Whoever said Alexander, the 13th Duke of Dalforth, was a stand-up guy, not one of the long line of the debauched, was wrong.
And I don’t quite know how to feel about that.
45
Alexander
I’d thought it strange how, as I entered the large room I’d been allocated, I noticed the fire in the marble fireplace had been lit. A second glance told me the effect was achieved by a flick of a switch. Old-world charm via modern convenience allowing the heavy mahogany furniture to gleam in the lambent light. The bed linens have been turned down as though this were a hotel, the navy drapes and counterpane giving the room a masculine air. A Marc Chagall painting hangs between a long pair of windows, where I pull open one of the panelled shutters and stare out into the darkness as noise of the revelry downstairs is carried on the air.
I shrug off my jacket and top up my drink, resolutely ignoring my father’s damning words as they resound through my head.
Blood will out.
I refuse to feel damned or tainted. By him. By Griffin. By Holland herself. How can this be wrong when I feel so expectant? The effervescent anticipation of what’s to come twirling and twining inside me.
She’ll come. I know she will.
Better still, I know blackmail isn’t the reason she will.
She’ll come because she wants me. Not because of my empty threats. Not because of Griffin.
If she doesn’t come to my room tonight, then she’s not invested in her lie. And if she’s not invested, then I must examine why she went to such lengths to keep me away in the first place. She has no interest in my brother. She’d used him only as a shield. A shield to keep me away . . . and because she can’t trust herself.
My wry smile is reflected back at me in the darkened window. For two weeks, I’ve turned myself inside out at the thoughts of them together, despite telling myself none of it could be true. That she could prefer him, seek his touch over mine, is a thought that I’d used to torture myself.
My beautiful, beautiful liar.
I hope you’re ready to pay.
I shift my gaze from my reflection to the land beyond the window, my mind drifting to Kilblair. My birthright. The chain around my neck. The land I’ve fought so hard to protect, and the people in it. Yet I’d risk it all for her. Risk the truth coming out, risk the disappearance of our revenue, because no one would want to be involved with a duke with the kind of reputation I risk.
The moon hangs white-gold in a black velvet sky, its reflection like a pearl dropped into a lake. I close my eyes and see the dark gardens of my ancestorial home. The gardens undulating as far as the eye can see in a carpet of midnight greenery, dotted here and there with three-hundred-year-old cedar trees, each just one bad storm away from being uprooted. A fitting metaphor for how I feel when Holland is near.
Uprooted. Discombobulated. All at sea.
The floorboards creak out in the hallway, and a seismic thrill courses through me.
She’s here.
And only twenty minutes late.
Does this prove how conflicted she feels?
Conflicted about wanting me.
But she does want me, or why else is she standing on the other side of the door?
Not because of a threat she knows is empty.
She might think she’s using my supposed blackmail as an excuse. She might even tell herself she’s safe this way. Safe from deepened feelings. From complications.
But I need to tell her the truth so we can both stop playing our parts in this farce.
The truth that I love her. That I have no intention of ever letting her go.
I turn to face the door, settling my glass and myself against the windowsill, affecting a position of studied nonchalance.
There follows . . . nothing. Not a sound. Not a footstep or the slightest rattle of the handle, just silence, rolling and unfolding between the door and me. A silence that grates on my every nerve because I know she’s there, standing in the hallway, second-guessing herself but still wanting me.
Come on, Holland. Come to me.
Want me more than you think is good for you.
Relief washes through me as the door clicks, then silently opens, and she slips into the room. Closing it softly at her back, she leans back against it, almost as though she’s not fully committed to being here. Liar. And there she stays, her eyes barely meeting mine, her hands behind her back, fingers no doubt still curled around the doorknob.