Chapter Twenty-Nine
The house was too quiet.
Anthony sat in his study with a glass of brandy he had poured an hour ago and not touched. The fire had burned down to embers. The clock on the mantel ticked with the relentless regularity of something that would not be hurried and could not be stopped.
He should go to bed. He should drink the brandy and go to bed. Then, tomorrow, he would wake up and continue the careful work of pretending that nothing had changed.
Instead, he sat in the dark and thought about Caroline.
He thought about the way she had looked in the studio, paint on her fingers, hair escaping its pins, utterly absorbed in her work. The way she had looked at him when he told her the arrangement was over—hurt and confused and trying so desperately not to show it.
The way she had felt in his arms. The taste of her on his tongue. The sound of his name in her voice as she came apart.
He had told himself he was doing the right thing. He had told himself that ending it was the only way to protect her, to preserve her chances at a respectable marriage, to keep her from being ruined by association with him.
But sitting here in the dark, he could admit the truth: he had ended it because he was afraid. Afraid of what he felt, what it meant…afraid that if he kept her, if he allowed himself to have her fully, he would become someone he did not recognize.
His father had been right about one thing: Anthony was not built for devotion. He was built for pleasure, for temporary amusements, for the kind of attachments that required nothing and ended cleanly.
What he felt for Caroline was not clean. It was messy and overwhelming and entirely beyond his control.
It waslove.
He had known it when he stopped himself from taking her fully. He had known it when he told her to leave. He had known it every moment since, as he tried and failed to go back to the life he had before her.
The problem was that love was not enough. Love did not change the fact that he was a rake, that his reputation was in tatters, andthat marrying him would make her life infinitely more difficult than marrying someone like Powell or Ashby.
Love did not change the fact that Lewis—his closest friend—would never forgive him. He had already been avoiding Lewis since the dinner with Powell. He could not look at his friend without feeling the weight of his betrayal. He had taken Lewis’s sister to gaming hells, boxing matches, and fortune tellers. He had kissed her. He had put his mouth on her and made her scream his name.
And now he sat here, unable to have her or forget her, and the silence of the house pressed against him like a physical weight.
He stood abruptly, the movement sharp enough to send the brandy glass tumbling from the arm of the chair. It hit the carpet with a dull thud, the amber liquid seeping into the fibers. He stared at it for a moment, then turned away.
The room felt smaller than it had an hour ago. Smaller than it had ever felt. He walked to the window and looked out at the dark street, at the empty pavement lit by a single lamp, and thought about all the nights he had spent in this house, alone or with women whose names he could no longer remember.
None of them had mattered. None of them had left any mark on him beyond the brief, fleeting satisfaction of physical pleasure.
Caroline had left everything.
He pressed his forehead against the cool glass and closed his eyes. Soon, Lewis would finalize the arrangement with Powell. Caroline would be engaged. She would marry a man who saw her as a solution to his problems rather than a person worth knowing.
She would marry a man who would never understand what she was—clever and brave and stubborn and utterly, devastatingly alive.
She would marry a man who was nothim.
And Anthony would do nothing to stop it, because doing something would require him to be someone he was not: someone worthy…someone who deserved her. Someone who could look Lewis in the eye and say:I love your sister, and I will spend the rest of my life proving that I am worthy of that love.
But he was not that man. He was a rake. A disappointment. A useless second son who had never been meant for the dukedom and who had spent his entire adult life proving his father right.
He opened his eyes and stared out at the empty street.
Tomorrow would come whether he was ready for it or not. Tomorrow, Caroline would move one step closer to a life that did not include him. And he would continue the work of pretending that he was fine, that he did not feel like something vital had been carved out of his chest and left to bleed.
Now, he stared at the glass that was now knocked over. It lay on the carpet, empty.
He left it there and walked out of the room.
Chapter Thirty