This is what he wants, she told herself.
This was him being honorable. She would leave here with her reputation intact, her future uncomplicated by scandal, and she would find a husband who could give her the life she was supposed to want.
The logic was sound. It was the execution that was agony.
When she reached the door, she paused, her hand on the handle, and looked back at him over her shoulder.
“Goodbye, Anthony,” she said.
Not ‘goodnight.’ Not ‘until next time.’Goodbye. That was the finality that he wanted…the same sheshouldwant…but now…
Cutting off the thought before it could form, she opened the door and walked out, leaving him standing alone in the firelight.
She heard her own footsteps in the hall, light and quick, moving toward the front entrance. She heard the sound of the door opening, then closing. She heard the silence of the street outside, broken only by the distant sound of a carriage and the hollow echo of her own breathing.
She walked to the waiting carriage and climbed inside, and only when the door closed and the carriage began to move did she allow herself to break.
The tears came hot and fast. She pressed her hand to her mouth to muffle the sound. She cried for what she had lost and for what she had never really had in the first place. She cried for the list and what it had cost her.
She cried for herself and the terrible realization that she had fallen in love with a man who could not—orwould not—love her back.
And Lady Caroline Marfront, sister of the Duke of Grayston, rode home through the dark streets of London and felt her heart break cleanly in two.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Stay down.”
Anthony spat blood onto the sawdust and braced one hand against the floor. The gymnasium was loud around him: voices, footsteps, the crack of leather on canvas somewhere to his left. His vision swam briefly, then steadied.
“I said stay down, Your Grace.”
But he pushed himself upright and turned to face Brennan, who stood with his fists lowered and an expression that suggested he had stopped enjoying this bout approximately three rounds ago.
“Again,” Anthony said instead.
Brennan did not move. “Your Grace—” He started, no doubt already at the end of his bravery, humoring Anthony’s unhinged desire to be beaten to a nasty pulp.
“I am paying you to hit me,” Anthony said. “Not to stand there looking concerned.”
Brannan’s expression crumbled into one of exhaustion. The window with which he’d enjoyed smashing his fist into the face of nobility had long since closed, and what now remained was a wary exhaustion.
“You’re not defending yourself this time either, Your Grace,” he said, even though Anthony knew those were not the words the other man truly wanted to say.
His true words were something along the lines of: “Please go away now, you miserable wretch.” Anthony could see it in the other man’s eyes as he tracked his movements, no doubt hoping Anthony would topple to the ground andstaythere.
“Did I ask for commentary?”
The man’s jaw tightened, but he finally raised his fists. Anthony adjusted his stance and waited. The blow came hard and fast, catching him across the jaw, and his head snapped to the side. Pain radiated through his skull, sharp and clarifying, and for one brief moment, there was nothing in his head except the pure physical fact of it.
Then it faded, and she was back.
Caroline.
The way she had looked at him when he told her their arrangement was over. The careful composure settled back into her shoulders, piece by piece, like armor she had briefly set aside.
The tremor in her fingers as she fastened her cloak.
“Again,” he said.