Page 94 of Duke with a Deception
“Did you leave the ball to read these old letters?” he asked softly, trying to comprehend what had happened.
“No.” She shook her head, then dashed at the tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I came here because I wanted to mop the champagne off my gown. The lady’s withdrawing room had a line. But when I traveled up the steps and reached this room, everything returned to me all at once. It was as if I had been hit in the head a second time. I remembered the ball, you coming to me in the alcove and giving me your handkerchief.I remembered Leo. I remembered why I was crying. I-I remembered it all.”
He reached Verity and sank to his haunches so that he was no longer hovering over her, but instead eye to eye. “I intended to tell you.”
Her face crumpled. “Then why didn’t you?”
Goddamn.It was as if his own heart were being torn from his chest, bloody and still beating, and he could do nothing but watch as the life left him.
“I was trying to find a way,” he forced out, “a time, to make it easier for you.”
“Well.” She laughed bitterly. “Thank you so much for your consideration, Your Grace.”
“I can explain, Verity.”
“I very much doubt that you can.”
“Let me try,” he begged.
“Why should I?” she cried, shaking an unfolded letter at him as if it were a weapon she might use to cudgel him. “What can you say that will change the fact that we have been living a lie?”
“We haven’t been living a lie,” he denied. “The lie was that we were engaged and were in love. But what we have built together is true.”
“You let me believe I was in love with you and that you were in love with me.” She pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. “My God, you even told me you loved me. How you must have been laughing to yourself this whole time. Was this nothing more than a charade to you? Did I amuse you sufficiently?”
He reached for her. “I do love you, Verity. If you believe anything I say, believe that.”
“Don’t touch me,” she spat. “I don’t think you even know what love is.”
He recoiled, not wanting to push her. She was distraught and understandably so.
“None of this was a lark to me,” he told her, needing her to know that much. “I have never laughed at you, and neither did I set out intending to deceive you.”
“Then what were your intentions? I cannot comprehend why you would do this. Why would you marry me? Why not simply be honest? You could have told me that day over tea. You could have explained. I may not have remembered, but I would have understood. But this…what you have done…it is unforgivable.”
He was losing her.
King could see it in her eyes, the resentment, the anger, the betrayal. The love that had been there mere hours ago—never truly his to claim—was gone.
“I am sorry, Verity,” he rasped. “I never meant to hurt you.”
“But you did.” She blinked as her eyes filled with new tears. “I swore I would never marry after Leo died, and you took that away from me.”
“Would you have preferred to wither away, dressed in your mourning weeds, forever a dependent upon your brother, with no life of your own?” he demanded, frustrated with himself, with her.
This was not how he had wanted to reveal the truth to her. Not with a ballroom full of bloody guests milling about below.
“I wasn’t withering,” she denied. “I was living the life I had chosen for myself. The one you took away from me.”
“You were the one who wanted to marry.”
More tears ran down her cheeks. “Because I took a blow to the head.”
He wanted to dry those tears. Christ, how he hated that he was the cause of them.
He ground his molars, stifling the impulse, before he responded. “I had no notion of whether you would ever recall anything of the past.”
“No doubt, you hoped I wouldn’t. That would have been so much more convenient for you.”
