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Then he should tell her, he thought. Tell her he would miss her too.
But before he could speak, she spoke first.
“I was very wrong to liken you to cake,” she said.
“Is that an apology?”
“It’s an epiphany. With cake, I can have a whole piece. With you, I only get crumbs.” Melancholy shaded her usual light tone.
He did not know how to have conversations like this. But he said, “You’re angry with me.”
“You pretend to the world that you care about nothing but your teacups and clothes, but you don’t have to pretend with me.”
But he did have to pretend. She didn’t know how he had waited for her and planned their future together. She didn’t know how he had forged an elaborate story so no one would stop him from traveling a thousand miles to ask her to be his. She had no idea that his youthful heart had shattered into pieces that day in the gardens in Vienna when she laughed away their love as a silly infatuation. She could not conceive of the way she then trampled those pieces into dust when she kissed another man while Leo sat in the room. As far as she was concerned, whatever had lain between them had long since passed.
It wasn’t her fault; it was his fault for misunderstanding. And it was his pain.
He didn’t want it to end like this, but he knew what would happen if he let himself go down that path again.
“If…” She stopped, swallowed, breathed. “If I were to say I love you, would that horrify you again?”
His mind blanked. His muscles braced.
Juno sat up abruptly, sheets spilling about her like sea foam about Venus. “Easy, there. Calm down.” She flipped her hair to one side. “I know this part: This is where you make that speech to remind me we have no future together because you are a duke. Save your breath. That was not a marriage proposal. I do not aspire to be a duchess. I know we have no future together. I merely wished to express how I feel. And what I feel is that I love you. I can love you without wanting to marry you.”
Her words spun around him, gossamer and tensile as a spider’s web. He rolled away from her and off the bed, landing so heavily the floorboards groaned through the plush rug.
“You may say what you please,” he said, as he crossed the room to hunt down his clothes. “Those are your sentiments. Perhaps they are even true.”
“Perhaps? You do not believe me?”
“I believe that you believe it. But what is this love of yours anyway? You feel it, you indulge it, and then it fades. You fall in love three times a day, you said, and no doubt fall out of love four times. Today, you say you love me. In a month, you will say, ‘Oh yes, the Duke of Dammerton. I knew him once.’”
“You think I will forget this? Forget you?”
“No doubt I shall inspire some lovely paintings before then.”
He found his drawers, his breeches, tried to sort them out, one from the other. They were not cooperating.
“You love easily and generously, but it is not your nature to love long or with any constancy, is it?” he continued.
He shoved his feet into his clothes. Nothing seemed to work. He felt like a fool, hopping around, unnaturally clumsy. He scrubbed a hand over his face and caught her scent.
“Is this what you think of me, then?” she persisted. “That I am inconstant? I have no true, lasting emotions?”
“You said you loved me before, and that lasted how long? You feel emotions, deeply even, but they are nothing but fuel for your art.”
“You resent that my first love didn’t last? All those years ago?”
She was sitting upright, uncaring of her glorious nakedness, so comfortable in her own skin. He hunted down his shirt and went back to trying to remember how to dress.
“Let me tell you what lasted,” she said, in a hard, quiet voice that followed him around the room. “My memory of your face as you stared at me in the meadow. Howappalledyou looked when I said I loved you. Then you spouted that nonsense about duty and honor and assured me we had no future together. And then—” She uttered a sharp, scoffing laugh. “Then you took up gambling like every other mediocre young gentleman. Even in Vienna I heard tales of how you practically lived in London’s gaming hells. You ran wild in Vienna, drinking and reckless. You married aprincess, for heaven’s sake! And I was— What? Was I supposed to pine for you? Weep and moan and wring my hands or whatever other nonsense is expected of a lady who is unlucky in love? Let myself waste away to nothing, let life pass me by and refuse to allow myself any happiness because I attach that happiness to only one man? Perhaps I should have thrown myself at your feet and wept. Perhaps I should have died of a broken heart. Would that have satisfied your definition of love?”
He said nothing. Dressing. Dressing was all he had to do. The arm goes through the sleeve, the button goes through the hole, the heart goes straight to hell.
“For heaven’s sake, Leo, when I told you I loved you back then, your response was to point out that I was not good enough for you.”
Leo froze. His heart seemed to stop. He straightened, the linen of his shirt falling over his stomach and thighs, and took her in. The curls tumbling around her face made her look younger. Her eyes were both hard and full of appeal.
