He simply stood there, temptation incarnate, by his need as much as his beauty. “Why not?”
She struggled to push back loosened pins, to re-create order. “We didn’t come here for this.”
“We didn’t come for tea, either. We’ve just had tea.”
“Is that what it is for you? Like tea?” It was nonsensical, but she threw it as a weapon.
“I don’t much like tea.” Then he sobered. “Is this one of the games you like, or do you really not want to?”
It made her feel ashamed, and confused, and uncertain, and she wanted to soothe him in the one way that seemed to work....
“Marry me, Maria.”
At the shocking words, she retreated another step, shaking her head. “No, Van. No. That was never part of this.”
He became still. “So. It was just an amusement for you.”
“No!”
“Then what? Why not? Am I wrong in feeling there’s something special between us?”
She lowered her hands and felt a heavy hank of hair tumble down her back. “Not wrong, but not right either. I’m eight years older than you.”
“Well then,” he said, “will you mind if I marry Natalie?”
She just stared. Eventually she managed to say, “If she’s willing—”
“She’s nine years younger than I am.”
She could have slapped him. “That’s not the same thing!” Then she braced herself to say the words that always hurt. “More importantly, I’m barren.”
She saw it hit him, shaking him. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” She snared the fallen hair, coiled it, and fixed it in place. “I’ve never shown any sign of conceiving.” She fired a fatal arrow. “And it wasn’t Maurice’s fault. Natalie is his daughter.”
His sudden pallor made his eyes an even more brilliant blue. He bent abruptly to pick up the hairpins that had fallen from her hair, and when he rose, he was merely sober. “What if I don’t care?”
“You have to care. It’s your duty to care.”
“Maria, I love you.”
She shook her head. “No. You can’t.”
He came over to her, pins in his extended, beautiful, scarred hand. “I thought that too. That I couldn’t love. I thought I was dead except for an inconveniently beating heart. Then you burst into my room that day and brought me back to life.”
She took the pins trying not to show how the mere brush of her fingers against his warm palm shuddered her. “I don’t regret it, but I will if you persist with this.”
Red flushed his cheeks, but he didn’t look away. “Are you denying what burns between us? Can you say it means nothing, that it’s on my side only?”
He’d put the blade in her hand, and all she had to do was wield it—deny her love, agree that it meant nothing....
She tried, but the sacrilegious lie stuck in her throat. Her lips moved, but no sound came out, and heaven only knows what he read in her face.
She turned sharply to the mirror, stabbing pins into her hair, striving for courage to cut him free.
She heard the door close and turned to find that he’d gone.
Van went downstairs in that state of shivering lightheadedness that had always swept over him after battle, when he’d realized that yet again he was miraculously alive and intact. But this battle had only just begun.
