Page 131 of The Duke's Sinful Deal
“I did not think—” she began, then stopped.
Maxwell did not interrupt.
She tried again. “I did not think he would—” She closed her eyes briefly. “It happened too quickly.”
The admission was simple.
It was also the first fracture.
“I was speaking with Eleanor,” she continued, her gaze dropping to her hands. “And then he was there, and nothing seemed contained any longer. Not in the way it should have been.”
Her fingers tightened.
“I could not stop it.”
Maxwell shifted slightly.
“You were not meant to stop it,” he said.
Arabella exhaled faintly. “That is not particularly comforting.”
There was no sharpness in it. Only truth.
She looked up then. “I was afraid.”
The words were quiet.
They did not need to be anything else.
“Not only of him,” she added, steadier now, “but of how easily everything might have shifted. How quickly it might have been undone.”
She paused.
“And I thought—” She stopped again.
Maxwell waited.
“I thought I might lose this,” she said at last.
Something changed in the carriage then.
She held his gaze.
“I did not realize how much that would matter.”
Maxwell did not answer immediately.
“I wanted to kill him,” he said at last.
The words were quiet.
Arabella’s breath caught.
He did not look away. “When I saw him with you, there was very little in me that cared what came after.”
The carriage shifted beneath them as the wheels caught uneven ground, a small jolt that neither of them seemed to register. Arabella’s fingers tightened slightly in her lap, the motion unconscious, her attention fixed on him.
“I know,” she said, though the words came softer than she intended, as if they had to pass through something before reaching him.
