It had to be.
The powerful, important gentleman was dressed in the clothes of just twenty years ago.
The figure was also a perfect copy of the man staring up at him.
Her husband, always so assured, always so strong, wasshaking.
She swallowed and took another step into the room, her slippers soft on the Aubusson.
At last, she could no longer bear the painful silence, and she blurted, “Is it true?”
A slow exhale slipped past his lips, but he did not turn to her. No, his gaze remained riveted on the man above him. As if the answer to his misery was there. Somewhere.
“James?” she ventured.
“What?” he gritted out. “Is what true?”
“You do not love me at all?” she asked. She hated how her voice sounded in that moment. As if she longed for the merest crumb of his affection.
A tear slipped down her cheek, and she dashed the offending thing away.
“Oh, Jack,” he whispered, still transfixed by his father. By his past. “I cannot even begin to explain what I feel.”
“Please try,” she begged, her voice breaking slightly. “Because you just left me out there with everyone thinking that I was married to you because of a scandal.”
“Weren’t you?” he queried softly. “Married because of the scandal?”
The shock of those words, true or not, felt like a blade to the heart.
She licked her lips, trying to find the right words. Could there be right words?
“You told me that you wanted to make me happy and that you wanted to make things right,” she rushed.
“Yes,” he agreed, his voice hollow, as if someone had reached into his chest and seized his heart, leaving him empty. “To prevent a scandal, but it is you, Jack, who created the scandal. In the end it isyou. You chose to come to my rooms alone and you did not want to accept the lot that you had in life. And for that, I admire you. But we are here,” he ground out, “because you could not follow the rules.”
She blinked, the pain of those words leaving her spinning with horror. He was not wrong. And that made the agony of it inescapable. “You want me to follow rules?” she breathed.
His shoulders bowed, and he gave a tight nod. “Rules are what have kept me from becoming my father. I cling to them to keep my mind sharp. To keep delusions from ever entering my thoughts.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she returned.
He whipped toward her then, and the suffering in his eyes nearly crushed her.
“I am not being absurd,” he growled, the passion now coursing off him like a fire blazing through a dry forest. Deadly. Terrifying. All-consuming. “Did you not see what almost happened to me out there? I could have killed Drexel on the spot. I wasn’t going to challenge him, Jack. I was going to throw him down upon the ground and beat him till he could not speak. Because he hurt you.”
His hands coiled into fists, and his chest began to rise and fall in swift takes as his breath became ragged. “Thatis why I said nothing.”
She could not answer under the sudden onslaught of his anger and his agony. What had she done? What had they done?
And good God, what had been done tohim? All those years ago… All those years ago when he had been forged into the man standing before her.
Deliberately, he drew in slow breaths, but that fury still blazed behind his brilliant gaze. “That is why I cannot be close to you. You do not know the truth of what has made me. You do not know what happened to my father, at the end. And I could never do to you what he did to my mother.”
The words spilling out of him? He felt them powerfully. She could see he was so certain that what he said was true. He believed it with his bone and sinew.
But that was not the man she knew and loved. The boy who had been her friend, and the man who had come to her aid.
“And you never will,” she protested fiercely.