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How did her voice sound so...normal when her tongue felt too thick, too heavy for her own mouth?
‘I thought I saw you,’ she pressed on when Kane didn’t answer. ‘But then...you were gone.’
He still didn’t answer, and the silence pulled between then, taut and close. She tried again.
‘I thought I’d imagined you.’
Still he didn’t react, and Mattie hated it that she couldn’t read him. That she had no idea what he was thinking.
How could she bring herself to tell him the rest, if she didn’t know what was going on in that closed-off head of his? How could she admit that she’d called off the wedding to George because she’d finally accepted the fact that no one else would ever claim her heart whilst it had still been trying to cling to the memory of Kane?
She needed something from him. Anything.
‘Why didn’t you say something, Kane? Anything?’ She could hear her voice rising and she fought to pull it back under control. ‘What were you even doing there?’
‘What does it even matter now?’ he demanded, his voice too gritty, too raw for her to bear. ‘You married him, and it fell apart. You moved on. It happens.’
‘It doesn’t happen,’ she choked out. ‘At least, not like that.’
‘I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re saying.’ He lifted his shoulders, as if it didn’t matter one way or the other.
But it did matter. At least, to her. He stared at her and she shook her head, searching for the right words.
‘My marriage didn’t fall apart,’ she choked out at last. ‘My engagement did.’
Another icy fog of silence swirled around the room. Mattie tried not to shiver, but it was hopeless.
‘Say again?’ Kane rasped eventually.
She didn’t think she could until she heard the words dropping awkwardly from her lips. ‘I never left the army because I never married. I called it off after that night...after the wedding rehearsal.’
‘Why?’
She’d known the question was coming but she couldn’t bring herself to answer it. How could she tell him the truth? What would be the point?
Because when it had come down to it, the only reason her marriage to dear, sweet, kind George—who had to have been the most perfect man alive—had fallen apart was simply because he hadn’t been Kane.
As shameful as that was.
And now that they were in the situation they were in...what difference did it make anyway?
CHAPTER FIVE
MATTIE WASN’T JUST not married to her precious earl...she’d never married him.
The revelation rolled round and round in Kane’s head until he couldn’t think of anything else. He wasn’t even sure that he was still breathing.
And she had seen him that night after all. He hadn’t just imagined her staring right at him. But all this while that he’d told himself she’d turned to her fiancé without even appearing to take a second look in his direction—effectively dismissing him from her thoughts, her life—the reality was that she’d thought she’d simply imagined him.
What the hell was he supposed to take from that?
The fact that Mattie had accepted the idea that her subconscious had conjured up an image of her first boyfriend on the night of her wedding rehearsal dinner. And the fact that she had ended up not going through with her wedding. Those two thoughts raced through Kane’s head, so utterly neck and neck that he couldn’t tell which thought was chasing the other. Or even if they were connected at all.
Questions jostled for room in his head, elbowing each other out of the way as they tried to get to his tongue. To spill out into the silence. But Kane didn’t want to let them. He needed time to absorb this new revelation. He needed to think.
Mattie, it seemed, had other ideas.
‘How did you know I was getting married?’ she demanded, and he tried not to read too much into the breathless tone. ‘How did you even get inside? It was a private party.’
