Page 74 of A Wallflower for the Disguised Earl

The title took him by surprise. It was the first time she had ever addressed him correctly, and it sounded like a death sentence.

“Corinna, please,” Edmund whispered, taking a half-step forward. He did not reach for her. He knew he had lost the right to touch her. “Do not call me that.”

“It is your name,” she stated, her voice perfectly even, betraying absolutely no emotion. “It is who you are.”

“It is what I was born to be,” he corrected, his chest heaving as he stared down at her. “But it is not who I am when I am with you.”

Corinna did not blink. Her gray eyes, usually so animated when she was thinking hard or amused, were dark and entirely unreadable. “You asked to speak with me. I am here. Say what you came to say, so I may go back inside.”

The cold detachment in her tone shattered the last of his defenses. He looked at her, at the stubborn tilt of her chin, and the crushing love he felt for her flooded his veins.

“I love you,” Edmund said. The words tore out of him, raw, bleeding, and absolute.

Corinna flinched, a minute, almost imperceptible tightening of her jaw, but she held her ground.

“I love you,” he repeated, his voice dropping into a ragged, desperate plea. “It has been true since the garden at the Whitmore ball. It was true when you caught me off guard by the pond, and it was true when we played chess in the drawing room, and it has been true every single agonizing moment since. I did not want to meet anyone this Season. I did not want to feel anything. And then you looked at me, and you saw straight through the coat, and you destroyed every defense I had left.”

She pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders, the night wind whipping a stray strand of dark hair across her cheek.

“I am sorry,” Edmund continued, the words spilling out in a rush, terrified she would turn and walk away before he could finish. “I am sorry in ways I do not have the adequate vocabulary to express. I am sorry for the lie. I am sorry for the masquerade. I am sorry that my cowardice brought this disaster to your door. If I could take it all back, if I could walk into your aunt’s house on the very first day and introduce myself as Edmund Ashford, I would do it. I would trade the title, the estate, everything, just for the right to stand here and ask you to be my wife.”

The silence in the garden grew incredibly heavy, thick with the undeniable, electric chemistry that had always existed between them. It was a physical ache, a desperate, magnetic pull that urged him to cross the remaining three feet, to pull her into his arms and bury his face in her hair. But he stood rooted to the spot, shackled by his own dishonor.

Corinna looked at him for a very long time.

“It is too late,” she said. Her voice was entirely even, a masterclass in quiet, disciplined control.

“I know,” Edmund whispered, the fight completely draining out of his broad shoulders.

“Our families must be protected,” Corinna continued, her logic as ruthless and precise as her chess stratagems. “My mother’s standing, my father’s pride. The scandal must be buried. Vivienne will be a Countess, and the ton will move on to the next piece of gossip. That is the reality of the board we are playing on.”

She paused, taking a slow, steadying breath.

“Whatever existed between us,” she said, looking directly into his eyes, “is the price of that protection. And I have accepted it.”

“Corinna…”

“You are the best liar I have ever encountered, my lord,” Corinna said, her words slicing through the freezing air. “You hid your true position flawlessly. You sacrificed your pieces with absolute precision. A good chess game. I give you that.”

Her voice was perfectly, flawlessly even. But her eyes were not.

Edmund looked into her gray eyes and saw the crack in her armor. He saw the shattering heartbreak she was desperately trying to conceal. He saw the tears shining unshed in the moonlight, betraying the icy façade she had constructed to survive this conversation.

She loved him. She loved him entirely, and she was letting him go because she possessed the courage and the honor that he had so completely lacked.

The realization was a knife twisting directly into his heart.

Corinna did not wait for him to respond. She turned on her heel, her dark skirts rustling against the frost-covered grass, and walked back toward the house. She climbed the stone steps, opened the glass door, and stepped inside. The door clicked shut, severing the connection entirely.

Edmund stood in the empty garden, the biting wind cutting through his clothes. He stared at the glass door long after she had disappeared, his chest heaving with silent, ragged breaths. The absolute finality of his loss crushed the breath from his lungs.

A shadow moved near the wrought-iron gate.

Julian stepped quietly into the garden, walking across the grass to stand at Edmund’s elbow.

Julian did not offer a comforting pat on the back. He did not offer a charming deflection or a word of false hope. He looked at Edmund’s devastated face, and he said absolutely nothing at all.

Because there was nothing left to say.