Page 70 of Cora
“I wanted to know whether there was a man worth knowing behind that ruthless mask you wear in public. I was confident and curious enough to bet the rest of my life that there was a caring heart.”
She touched him in the center of his chest. Though the contact was gentle, Gideon rocked on his heels, dizzy like he had taken a blow to the solar plexus.
“I was wrong. It was all just another cruel trick.”
She smiled sadly and pulled back, clasping her hands in the center of her chest like a prayer. “It is one thing to hurt me on purpose. You had a reason, in a twisted sort of way. Just because your family is devoted to the worship of Wentworth’s bank doesn’t mean you can mold me into your image. You only wanted me because you couldn’t have me. Once I was yours, I was no longer the compelling ingenue or mysterious spinster. I was only plain old me. Cora. I had to be changed. Molded. Shaped into someone you could show to others without embarrassment.”
Her hands dropped to her sides. “I know what you did, Gideon.”
Her words left him standing adrift in a howling void. He was sinking. Drowning in his own cold-hearted perfidy. Found out, like a naughty schoolboy, only his punishment would be far worse than a thrashing.
“I know what you did to my family,” she said quietly. “How you created that bank run. You would have ruined my brother, who has been my closest family and best friend, the man who has stood by me no matter what, the only person who understands what it means to be constantly unwanted and perpetually on the outside…”
She bit off.
“How?” he croaked. He’d been so careful. Hunted her down like a wolf after a lamb. The rumor he started should have been untraceable back to him.
“Honey told me.” Her eyes misted, but her chin tipped upward with resolve.
“When?”
“Before the performance.”
“So that’s why you played that song. For revenge.” A servant chose this tense, awkward moment to inform them that her carriage had arrived. “I do love you.”
Her eyes flared wide. Then her gaze dropped to her feet. When she raised them again, unfathomable sadness darkened her eyes like a forest at midnight.
“You have a strange way of showing it,” she said quietly.
Cora swept out into the night as regal as the day she had ventured into the private chapel to marry him. He could not stop her, for he knew now that vows based upon coercion and manipulation were nothing more than empty promises.
As enraged as his mother had been by Cora’s performance tonight, divorce was unthinkable. Scandalous beyond repair. Victoria would be appalled.
He had to win her back. It was imperative that he find a way to fix this, for he had let her go once, and lived to regret it. He would not make the same mistake again.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-THREE
CORA
“No, I will not support your petition for a divorce.”
“You promised me, Lysander.”
Her brother raked his fingers through his hair, which made the antique-gold strands stick out in all directions. He appeared disheveled and he was certainly distracted. Ordinarily, Cora would ask him what had him so out of sorts, but she had her own problems now.
Such as falling desperately, irrevocably in love with a man who used her as a pawn to acquire her brother’s bank.
How could she have been so foolish? Carrying a torch for a man who gazed at her intensely across ballrooms more than a decade ago, for all these years. Stupid enough to jump at the chance to marry him just to satisfy her curiosity. Saving her family had been the excuse she needed to throw caution to the wind.
She had wanted answers, and now that she had them, her heart felt like it had been cut out, leaving a bleeding hole inside her chest.
“Gideon only wanted me as a means to an end,” she declared, pacing his study the way she’d done that day in Eryx’s parlor with Annalise. “To obtain Wilder & Co.”
“But you agreed to it.”
“We left an escape hatch for me on purpose!”
Titi scuttled away and launched herself into Lysander’s lap. He petted her absently. The tiny dog settled onto his thighs, content. She glared at her beloved pet. Titi was no help at all, switching her affections whenever there was a man around.
