Lady Vivian’s voice softened further. “Women like me understand men like you. We do not expect permanence, we do not expect stability, and we do not build ourselves around something that will inevitably fall apart. But women like her do, and when that happens, they break.”
Dorian looked away briefly, a controlled movement that gave away more than he likely intended.
“I have not given her reason to believe anything false,” he said.
Lady Vivian gave a small, almost pitying laugh. “You do not have to. You only have to exist as you are.”
Silence followed.
Dorian picked up the papers again, though he was no longer reading them. “I think you are attempting to manufacture concern where there is none,” he said.
Lady Vivian watched him for a long moment. “And I think you are afraid of how easily she has become important to you.”
“I am not interested in this conversation,” he grunted.
“And yet you are listening,” she pointed out calmly.
He did not answer.
When she eventually left, she did so without further argument, leaving behind only the words he would have preferred not to hear.
He remained where he was for several minutes after, the papers still clutched in his hand. But his attention was no longer on them because what Lady Vivian had done, whether intentionally or not, did not introduce a new fear. She had only given shape to one that had already begun forming inside him—that Anne might one day look at him and realize she had chosen something that would hurt her more than it could ever protect her.
For the first time since he had begun allowing himself to want her, the thought did not leave easily.
Unfortunately, that would not be the last argument he had that day. An old investor decided to call, undoubtedly because LadyVivian and her father were present. It was the last thing Dorian wished to handle, but he could not escape his responsibilities.
“You have done well enough lately,” the man said, though his smile suggested otherwise. “But reputations are not easy to maintain, Your Grace. One scandal, one misstep, and the old doubts return faster than you can banish them.”
Dorian stood near the window, one hand tucked behind his back, composed in the way he had been trained to be in such situations.
“I am aware of how reputations work,” he replied evenly.
“Are you?” the man asked. “Because I am not convinced you understand what it costs to sustain one when you have already spent years damaging yours.”
“I do not require lectures on my past conduct.”
“And yet your past conduct is precisely what determines present confidence,” the man argued. “Especially now that you have a wife.”
The words shifted something subtle in the room.
“Be careful,” Dorian warned quietly.
The man held his gaze a moment too long before softening his tone, though not his meaning. “I am only saying what others are thinking. That she is too young for the weight you carry. Men like you do not change because they want to, Your Grace. They change when there is nothing left to destroy.”
The remark lingered long after the man had left the room, even though the conversation itself ended in formal politeness and practiced dismissal.
By the time the house began to settle for the night, the words had not yet stopped echoing.
Dorian moved through the corridor without any sense of direction, the tension from the earlier exchange simmering beneath his skin, sharpened rather than eased by his exhaustion. The house was quieter, the guests having withdrawn upstairs, and it gave him a chance to spend some time alone.
He found the library still lit. Lady Vivian was already there, standing near the fireplace as though she had been waiting for him.
“I wondered how long it would take,” she said as he entered.
Dorian did not stop walking, only slowed down.
“If this is about what you told me in the drawing room,” he said, “I am not interested.”
