His gaze held hers, and he slowly raised his hand to rest against her face, which she was certain had turned pink. “Yet your cheeks seem to disagree with that explanation.”
“That is irrelevant.”
“It looks fairly relevant, from where I am standing,” he said.
She faltered further at his tone—light, unhurried, entirely too aware that he was having precisely the effect he wanted to have on her. She lifted her chin slightly, as though distance alone might restore control.
“I am not jealous,” she insisted.
Dorian’s smile turned more thoughtful, though it did not disappear. He took another small step closer, stopping just short of where propriety would have demanded it.
“I think,” he said, his voice lowering, “this may be the first time in my entire life that a woman has tried to convince me she is not jealous over me. Usually, they want me to think I am special to them when I am not, but you… you act as though I mean very little to you. Is that true, Duchess?”
Anne’s breath caught before she could stop it. For a moment, she did not trust herself to speak. Mortified, she turned sharply, as though she might simply escape the conversation before it could embarrass her further. She had barely taken two steps when Dorian caught her wrist, not forcefully, but with enough firmness to stop her without effort.
The contact alone sent shivers through her.
She froze, becoming sharply aware of the point where his fingers rested against her skin. Her breath caught before she could steady it.
For a brief, irrational moment, her thoughts betrayed her entirely, because the nearness, the quiet of the gardens, the way he held her so carefully…
Her mind dredged up an image she immediately regretted.
She turned slightly, uncertain, her pulse unhelpfully loud in her ears. Dorian did not move closer in the way she had half-feared and half-wanted. Instead, he simply held her there, his smile no longer amused but having softened into something more attentive.
“Anne,” he said quietly, as if testing whether she would actually leave him there without responding to his question.
Her throat tightened. “Let go,” she managed, though it came out less firm than she had intended.
He glanced down at her wrist, then back at her face. “Are you running away because I was right or because I was wrong?”
“I am not running away,” she said quickly.
Dorian’s thumb shifted slightly against her wrist, brushing her skin in a way that made the contact feel even more deliberate in its restraint. “That does not answer my question.”
Anne lifted her chin, trying to recover some of her earlier composure, though it felt significantly less reliable now.
“You are mistaken about everything,” she said.
Dorian studied her for a beat longer, then gave a quiet sigh that sounded more like contained amusement than disbelief. He was infuriating when he wanted to be, and she would have said so if she did not think he would enjoy hearing it so much.
“You look as though you expected something else to happen just now.”
“I did not,” she scoffed.
His gaze held hers. “You did.”
Heat rose to her cheeks again before she could stop it, and that alone felt like surrendering evidence she had not intended to offer.
“I thought nothing,” she insisted.
“That is usually what happens when it becomes too much,” he pointed out.
Anne pulled lightly at her wrist, but he did not release her. The resistance was minimal, and it only made the awareness between them sharper rather than resolved.
“Dorian,” she said, quieter now, “this is inappropriate.”
“We are married,” he reminded her.
