Page 49 of When her Duke Returns
“Because I don’t want this,” she admitted to him at last. “I don’t want to wed you, nor him, nor any other man. Not like this, not outside of my own choosing,” she finished quietly.
“Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true. You know it to be true as well as I,” she said and drew her hand to her bruised neck. “Let us be done with this, Antony.”
He snapped his head toward her. “Be done with what?”
“Withus,” Mary cried softly. “With our betrothal. If there is no love and no trust, there is no reason to consign ourselves to a lifetime of fighting.”
“No, no,no! “Antony shook his head violently as if to wish away a bad dream. “I will not lose you. I will not lose to him.”
“Listen to me,” she pleaded. “I’m not yours. And if I am not yours, not truly, then there is nothing to lose.”
“You will not charm me into letting you go. You cannot talk your way out of this with your idle revelations of spirit. I will not stand for it,” he muttered. “My words are still true from the first time you stabbed me in the back—I will ruin you, Mary. You are with me, or you are against me.”
Against all reason, Mary felt the weight of the world drop from her shoulders. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her face twisted into a smile. “So be it. Threaten me with ruin all you like… It means nothing to me. It has never mattered, none of it. Notsociety, nor the game, nor the finery—nothing. It has always been this way, only now, I fear, I am not afraid to shake off its coil and be free of you.”
Antony stared at her in agony. She did not know whether he was trying to make sense of her words or intimidate her into submission. Whatever his intent, she was impervious to him.
So be it.Her heart was bound to break no matter what future she found herself suffering: to be with Antony, to chase the Duke, to renounce them both and make a life elsewhere. If it was to break, let it break by her own volition.
“I mean it,” she said, refusing to back down. “Let me go. You said it yourself. This isn’t about me, not really. You want victory over the Duke more than anything else. Love can be replaced, but a life cannot.”
Antony’s jaw set to stone. “No,” he said, unblinking. “You don’t get to decide how we meet our end.”
“If you will not release me from our engagement then I will. I shall call it off tonight in front of everyone. There is nothing you can do to stop me.”
“You won’t do this,” he grizzled, and his eyes seemed to darken, black as night.
“Have you not heard me?” Mary howled. “There is nothing you can threaten me with to keep me bound to you. Nothing!”
Antony cleared his throat and seemed entirely at one with himself again. He looked upon Mary in disgust, inhaled deeply, and swept back his dark, wiry hair. “That is where you’re quite wrong, Mary. I have come to know you most intimately in our time together. Perhaps not as well as Redgrave, but well enough to win you over.”
Mary furrowed her brow. “No. Have you not heard me? It’s over!”
“Perhaps youaretoo far gone. Perhaps exile and ruin are beyond you, now,” he lulled. “But you would not be alone in your ruin, Mary. You will never be alone again. Not while I know what I know.”
Mary searched his eyes for some hint of his threat, and then it dawned upon her. “Harry… You mean to blackmail Harry?”
“Not Harry.You. He is but the means to our end.”
Mary sank to her knees and brought her hands together as if in prayer. “You can’t! They will hang him!” She clutched at the cloth of his trousers, of his coat, and let out an anguished series of cries. “Don’t do this! You wouldn’t,” she choked back. “Youcouldn’t—you would damn yourself.”
Antony smiled down at her and rested his hand against her cheek. “Anything for love,” he lulled, and it swept a chill over Mary’s body. With a contended sigh, he slipped his hand away and made to leave.
For what felt like an eternity, Mary could not bring herself to rise. She merely sat against the cold tile of the floor atop the pillow of her dress unable to make sense of things—much like a child, she felt, who had been privy to machinations far beyond her reach. She could not conceive of such spite, for it did not exist within her.
A set of light footsteps, far different from the heavy toll of her betrothed’s, came rushing up the cobbled path to the pergola.
“Oh, no…” her brother cried against the still of night. “Mary…What have you done?”
ChapterTwenty
Alexander was in no mood to socialize.
Ever since his return from war, he had felt most unlike himself—like a piece of a puzzle that simply would not fit. His Stanton match had revealed the gravity of this change: he looked upon her—this brilliant, beautiful, spirited young woman—with not one ounce of desire.
What he longed for above all else, what colored every instance of his life a dull shade of grey, was the right to be free: free from the scars upon his face, from the looks they earned him, free from the iron grasp of his name. He had spent much of the evening by himself, skirting the buffet, his betrothed, and their guests to the best of his ability, the taste of Mary still fresh in his mouth.
