Page 51 of A Diamond Deal
It felt like escape.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Poppy unthreaded her fingers, and pulled her hand free from the palm of his.
‘I think they’re gone,’ she said into the silence, and moved in front of him.
He wore all black. Tiny silver accents were everywhere. On the cuffs of his shirt. They created the buttonholes, lined every seam of his costume…
He looked like an angel kissed by stardust.
‘And why did you want them gone?’ he asked. ‘Why arewenot with them?’
‘You didn’t want to be with them.’ She searched the dark depths of his eyes behind his mask.
It was a simple design. Black silk with silver swirls sewn in delicate detail around his eyes. It covered his sculpted cheekbones, his noble nose, but it didn’t hide his eyes, his mouth.
His lips thinned. ‘What made you believethat?’
‘Because neither did I.’
She turned on her heel and walked back into the hall of mirrors. The lights had been turned off, but the hue from the palace gardens lit the space. It reflected from the wall of glass to her left.
‘And so because you wanted to stay behind,’ he said, his following footfall silent behind her, ‘you thoughtIdid too?’
She stopped beneath the first tall columns. The window between them was an array of squares, each locking in a different flush of green from the palace gardens. ‘Yes.’
He stood beside her. ‘But how did you know?’
She tilted her head—looked up at him. ‘Was I wrong?’
‘How did you know?’ he pressed, his question an urgent husk.
‘Little things.’
He frowned. ‘Little things?’
‘The tension in your shoulders,’ she said, her eyes following the rigid length of his broadness. ‘The flick of the pulse in your throat.’
And it pulsed now under her gaze.Hard.
‘I’m not tense,’ he denied.
‘I knew, because we’re married,’ she said. ‘Because I noticed you didn’t hurry to leave—that we stayed back.’
‘No.’ His black eyes flashed with a thousand shards of silver ice. ‘You’re a creature of too many contradictions, Poppy.Youcalled me a stranger. You can’t bend your convictions to suit you, becauseyouwant the night to end before it’s over. We’ll go outside.Now.’
He turned to leave, but gently she placed her fingers to his arm. Halted him.
All night she’d played the dutiful wife. Ignored the barbs of curiosity asking questions laced in venom, to acquire knowledge of her life—her marriage—for their titillation. And she’d done it for him. But this she would do for herself.
‘We’ve done enough for tonight,’ she said, because they had.
But hadshedone enough?
Her heart shrank. It had been easy to see his lack of desire to join the others. Little things anyone who knew him even a little could have seen, if only they’d looked.
She hadn’t been looking before.
