“I dare you to name one instance from the past eight years when you acted the part,” she hissed in response.
His eyes strayed from the rancor in her face and sparks in her eyes to the heaving swells above the neckline of her gown. Despite his anger—despite every rational part of him—he wanted her. He ached for her.
He always had.
He’d never stopped.
The desire had haunted his every moment, conscious or not, suffusing his blood with tendrils of heat that burst into an inferno in Alaina’s presence. They sparred like warriors, and he couldn’t help but wonder how that might translate to their chemistry in bed.
“Perhaps I should change that, presently.” His tone was dangerously deep as he spoke without thinking. The threat rang through the room like cannon fire. It was a grave mistake that slipped from lips plied by the wine boiling in his empty stomach.
Several tense, impossibly heavy moments passed between them before Alaina rose from the table and made to storm from the room.
“Alaina,” he growled. She was wise enough to hesitate in her steps. “I would be well within my rights, and you know that.” Sterling doubled down on his blunder, unable to stop the words though he knew how awful they sounded.
“I don’t know who you are,” she whispered harshly before fleeing.
Sterling listened to her retreating steps and dropped back into his chair. He shoved away his glass of wine, spilling ruby drops of the liquid on the pristine tablecloth before he snagged a roll of bread from the platter. It had long since grown cold, but it somehow felt fitting, given the stale, inhospitable state of his marriage.
*
“There,” Penny pattedAlaina’s hair when she finished the long plait and then turned to gather up the discarded items of clothing. As Alaina smoothed her hair over her shoulder and down the front of her cream-colored nightdress, her fingers went suddenly numb. Her mind returned to that night all those years ago when she’d sat in this very room and awaited her husband’s first nocturnal visit.
The night she’d been abandoned.
The start of her betrayal.
“Is…is everything alright, Your Grace?” Penny’s gentle voice broke through Alaina’s reverie.
Alaina attempted a wooden nod, but it didn’t fool her maid. Penny’s hand gently covered her own, silently forcing Alaina to meet her eye.
“I—I shouldn’t say anything, but they’re speaking of what happened in the servant’s quarters.” Lines of worry bracketed the maid’s mouth.
Alaina should have known the volume of their voices would have carried further than the dining room. She didn’t doubt the footmen, Paul and Andrew, would have stayed close by. even though they’d been told to leave—not primarily to eavesdrop, but in case they were needed. She had noted their hesitancy to exit the room when Sterling tried to dismiss them. It was likely clear to everyone in Morton House that the tension between Alaina and her husband was thick enough that Michelangelo, himself, probably couldn’t have chiseled away at it.
“You know,” Penny continued, “there are some who’ve been ’ere for a long time—longer than me. They say the duke ain’t a bad man.”
Alaina met her maid’s eyes. She realized Penny was trying to comfort her, to reassure her that Sterling wasn’t cruel….that he would not follow through on his threat to demand his husbandly right when she had made her aversion perfectly clear.
“If they were here before—”before he abandoned me“—before…then they knew the boy he once was. The man who returned is no boy. He is not the master they once knew, nor is he the man I agreed to marry. I doubt there is anyone who truly knows him anymore.” She squeezed Penny’s hand and released her before rising from the stool. “I certainly do not.”
The man who had once courted her—that she’d once agreed to marry what felt like a lifetime ago—would have replied to the multitude of letters she’d sent.
Thisman hadn’t bothered responding to a single one of them.
The man she’d married had been infinitely tender and patient in his pursuit of her.
The man who had returned from the Continent was boorish and unnerving.
Following Sterling’s abandonment of her on their wedding night, Alaina had collected the shards of her heart and reassembled them in some semblance of normalcy, and then made the decision to hunt down Sterling’s solicitor to demand he provide some way for her to contact her wayward spouse. It had taken several weeks of pestering, but she’d finally obtained a forwarding address. She knew it likely only led to a middleman who might deliver the correspondence wherever Sterling had landed that particular week, but it had been more than she’d begun with.
She’d heard enough in the gossip rags to know her husband moved around the Continent quite a bit…and enjoyed a variety of entertainments. He would have been near impossible to track down, even if she had been inclined to attempt a solo journey across the Channel. She’d cursed her limited skills and experience keeping her from anything bolder than putting ink on parchment.
Again and again, she’d written to her husband, persistent in her hope and faithfully sitting down to write to him several times each week and then sending them off to be delivered to the middleman who might then hand them over to her husband.
Regardless, Sterling hadn’t once seen fit to reply to any of her notes.
At first, she’d been pathetically hopeful that there was a delay in the post. Then, she told herself that perhaps some of the letters had been lost in transit.
