There was his sincerity again, etched in every feature.
She hadn’t expected him to speak about feelings. She hadn’t been sure he had any feelings.
Her throat tightened with an overwhelming emotion. Of course she’d known, somewhere deep down. She’d been lying to herself. It had been easier to ignore the whole sorry affair as long as she could pretend he cared nothing for her. Now he was taking even that away from her.
“Such sentiments pass,” she said tightly.
He tilted his head. “Perhaps. But unlikely. Once in place, my inclinations are rather persistent.”
Indeed, they would be. He did nothing half-measure, so the object of his inclination had better be prepared for a long and thorough stint of his attention.
Her shoulders sagged. “How could you,” she said. “How could you believe that I . . .” Her voice frayed. The scorching, frantic intimacy they had shared in his library flashed before her eyes and derailed anything she had ever learned about rhetoric.
“How could I believe what,” he coaxed gently.
“In the library. How could you think that I would negotiate terms,” she said, “and at such a moment.”
Understanding dawned in his eyes, surprisingly slowly for a man known as one of the country’s sharpest strategists.
“I see,” he said. “The timing did take me by surprise, but it was never a question that we would talk terms, Annabelle. A man takes care of the woman in his life.”
His life. Not his bed. She was trained to pay attention to the choice and nuances of words for her academic work, and this was a glaring, significant choice of one word over the other.
She felt hot and weak, too weak to move away when he raised his hand to her face. His fingertip stroked lightly over her bottom lip, and the tender contact unleashed a shower of sparks through her body.
Unthinking, she turned away and started toward the nearest window.
His study was on an upper floor, granting him an unobstructed view of Westminster Abbey. The steep spires and turrets were pointing like arrows toward the clear sky.
Footfalls approached and he halted next to her, his hands clasped behind his back, and so they stood side by side, wordlessly, acutely aware of the air pulsing heavily between them. On the street below, people carried on with their lives, a soundless teeming like ants across a forest floor.
“Were you married in the abbey?” she asked.
“No.” There was a sarcastic smile in his voice. “But they will bury me there.”
Her head jerked toward him. Lit by the pale winter sun, his strong profile looked vital, if not indestructible. The idea of him cold and white in a crypt, his perceptive eyes forever closed, squeezed her throat like a fist. For a beat, the world careened around her in complete silence, as if she’d gone deaf.
She wrapped her arms around herself.
He turned to her, forever sensing her shifts in mood. Surely he knew that she was still wholly in his thrall. Possibly for years to come.
“All right,” she said quietly. “How would it work? Us.”
His eyes narrowed. “How would you want it to work?” he finally said, his calm tone not fooling her for a moment. His body was tense as a panther’s coiling to pounce.
She gave a sullen shrug. “I wouldn’t know. I have no experiences with that sort of business.”
“Neither do I,” he said evenly. “Either way, the rules are for us to make.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “You haven’t kept a mistress before?”
“Once. A long time ago.”
Well. He did have his other arrangements, a certain countess for one.
He had stealthily moved in on her. She slipped out of his reach and began to pace on the rug in the center of the room.
“These are the things I do know,” she said. “If I were to accept your offer, I would lose all my friends. No decent woman would be seen with me.” His jaw tensed, and she continued quickly: “Second, I would lose my place at Oxford, and Oxford was my father’s lifelong dream. And third, once you tire of me, with my friends gone, who would keep me company? Other fallen women and the next man with deep pockets?”
His pupils flared. “Other men be damned,” he said, and stepped forward, “and I’m not going to tire of you.”
“How can you say that with certainty? Men often do tire of their companions, and walk away without as much as a backward glance.”
He halted. “Is that what you are afraid of,” he said, “that I will abandon you?”
“I’m not afraid,” she protested. “I’m not afraid. I just stand to lose a lot.”
He didn’t reply. Because he couldn’t deny any of what she had said, and, worse, because he had no solutions to offer. She had expected this, but it was undeniably disappointing.
“And what about the things you would gain,” he said, “all the things I can give you?”
She would have to be a fool to not have considered it. With him in control, survival was certain. The worries that followed her everywhere, unshakable like shadows, the constant scouring for opportunities to keep herself warm and fed and safe—everything that drove her mind in circles at night—Montgomery could take away with the stroke of a pen. And none of that tempted her half as much as the prospect of being with him. Within weeks he had gone from a stranger to someone whose presence she craved; she wanted to fall asleep in his arms with his scent in her nose. She wanted to be the keeper of his worries and joys until his hair had turned white and they were old.
But what he offered was built on sand.
The sin of it all aside, outside the walls of her fancy house she would become invisible. Montgomery would become her world, and he’d own her body and soul. She’d spend her days waiting for him, alone in an empty house, and the gaps between his visits might grow longer, and longer . . .
Unbelievably, her heart still dithered. And so she said something she would have liked to forget completely: “What about your wife?”
His body went rigid. “What about her?”
She had to shove the words out of her mouth. “Everyone expects you to take a new wife within the year.”
His face shuttered. “It would have nothing to do with us.”
“How would it be?” she pressed. “Would you come to me although you have been with your duchess? Go back to her after you have shared my bed?”
“That would be inevitable,” he said, a cruel note entering his voice. Never say he’d try charm and deception to get what he wanted; if only he did, it would be easier to give him up.