Page 16 of Obsession: The Unspoken Sin
“So, Exmoor knows?” he demanded.
“I’m not discussing my brother with you.”
The relaxed demeanor of before left Laurence. He sprang into movement, launching to his feet and then into a fast back-and-forth pace. His restlessness proved contagious.
“I’ll ask you one more time, Alice,” he said, “is your family aware of your presence here? And the reason behind it?”
Enraged at his insistence and unsettled by this all-powerful, commanding stranger issuing directives and demanding answers, she climbed to her feet and stumbled over her words.
“It matters not. It matters that this is my place. Here I have a new home and a new life. And now you know why.”
Suddenly furious with herself for having leaned into a weakness of the past, she fumed. “My God, I can’t believe I told you any of this.”
He took an angry step toward her. Despite knowing he’d never hurt her, reflexively, she found herself backing away at his approach.
“Alice, when I came upon you, I understood, or IthoughtI understood,” he said, putting a steely emphasis on that particular word.
“You were always spirited and independent and loved art. I believed you were here of choice, that your Bohemian spirit sent you to this place, a gaming hell, of all places,” he hissed. “But this.” Angrily, he slashed a hand up and down in the air. “This isn’t a choice as much as you may present it as one. You have not chosen to be here. You have forced yourself to stay here.”
Alice sputtered, indignant and outraged at his high-handedness.
“Oh, you can deny it all you want, but I don’t believe for one moment that if you were free to live somewhere else with your daughter that you wouldn’t. You’ve chosen a self-exile and imposed yourself here, believing your family will eventually resent you and hate you for circumstances that belong, not with you, but with some bastard who betrayed you.”
Vitriolic rage dripped from his tone.
“A bastard who, if he wasn’t already dead, I’d happily hunt down and rip apart with my bare hands. He is the one whodeserves to be punished. Not you. You, however, are determined to play the martyr, and in doing so you’d force your daughter into an unsafe, uncertain, and horrid exist—”
Alice struck out, catching him in the face with her palm, so hard, quick, and with such ferocity his head whipped back. The crack of flesh meeting flesh rang in the nighttime still.
Nauseous, her heart rang sickeningly against her rib cage. Alice stared at the mark her palm had left upon his beloved cheek. With a stoic calm, Laurence swiped his hand down his marked cheek.
Oh God. She’d struck him. “I’m so sorry, Laurence.” Tears filled her throat and made speech a struggle. “I didn’t mean to strike you.”
She’d rather pluck out her fingernails than hurt him. He’d driven her to such rage by questioning her intentions and her ability to care for her daughter but he wasn’t deserving of her violence.
Alice took in a steadying breath. “But questioning how I raise my daughter and everything I sacrificed for her… I will not have you disparage my intentions or my love or commitment to her.”
The solemn way in which he nodded and pardoned her offense only made her feel all the worse for that loss of control.
In his reappearing in her life, he’d resurrected all the old love and longing she’d carried for him and would forever carry for him. She’d let him in, and it had been a mistake. It would take her more than a fortnight to erect walls again.
It’d take her a lifetime to build a fortress big enough to erase this day-long reunion.
A steadying breath.
“It’s not my intention to fight with you, Laurence,” Alice said, with greater calm. “You are my friend. You’ll always be my friend.”
That’s what he’d said. He’d been the one who’d declared that to be the entire extent of their relationship forevermore.
“I would never hurt you, and I know you would never hurt me. As such, I’m asking that you not speak to my family about our seeing one another here. And for you and I, there is no further need for us to meet now. Everything else has been said.”
Before she did something stupid and reckless, like wrap her arms around his narrow waist and hold onto him and fight to never let go, she somehow managed to bow her head, return to her mount, climb astride, and leave. They’d never really had a chance to say goodbye when she’d left the first time. This marked an actual closure that both she and he were aware of, and it carried with it a finality that cleaved her heart in two.
Chapter 7
Denbigh’s outing with Alice had gone not only bad, but spectacularly so.
He sat at his private table in the Devil’s Den. Slouched in his seat with a thick cloud of smoke hanging just above his head, he looked on at the evening’s entertainments with unseeing eyes.
