Page 65 of My Hero
“Mariana…”
“Aye?” She slid back and forth against him, ready for another bout.
“Mariana,” he said, grasping her knees to still her. “Not now. I have to speak with you.”
“Speak!” She scowled, ruining her finely-painted features. “Speak! All you ever want to do is speak!”
”But Mariana…”
Diplomacy was useless now. She was riled. And when she was riled, her temper exploded quicker than a thundertube.
“What kind of beast are you?” she fired, dragging herself off of him. “Other men would give their right arm to lie with me!” She snatched her vermilion gown from the peg. “Yet here I stay—ready, willing, begging for your affections!” She struggled into her surcoat. “And you! You want to talk!” The dress scraped over her hips and pooled at her feet like blood. “Do you know what I think? I think you have nothing left to give me!” She ran her long nails briskly through the tangles of her hair. “You say you want to marry me. Well, I’ve waited months for you to mature, to grow into the lover they claim is the de Ware legacy, and I have yet to see it.” She stuffed her feet into her slippers. “How can you call yourself a de Ware? How can you call yourself a man?”
An unshed agony of tears burned Garth’s throat. His chest felt heavy, as if he were burdened by ten coats of chain mail.
His vulnerability must have shown on his face, for Mariana’s next words were laced with pity.
“I can’t marry you, Garthie. No woman should have to live so…” She glanced at the bed. “Unfulfilled.” Whirling her matching red cloak about her shoulders, she gave him one last, long, appraising look. Then she added with a gentle sigh, “Maybe you were right to choose the church after all. You should have no trouble pleasing that bride.”
And then she was gone forever.
Beneath his ponderous ribs, his crushed heart knifed diagonally against his lungs. Pain and shame and despair balled into a knot in his belly. For an awful eternity, he was unable to draw breath.
Then, when he did, when he knew he’d not die mercifully of a broken heart, the air rasped across his torn throat in a horrible, inhuman sob.
“Mariana!” he cried. “Don’t leave me!” His own voice sounded foreign to his ears, like the wailing of a tortured prisoner. “Mariana!”
“Garth!”
From the mists of sleep, Mariana’s voice sounded strange.
“Garth!”
The colors of his boyhood room faded as he was pulled away by the voice. The pain in his chest increased.
“Garth!”
Someone was tugging at him, making him sit up. He didn’t want to. It hurt too much.
“Garth, you have to help me.”
The pungent scent of mint roused him from the vestiges of his dream. He involuntarily inched upward to accommodate the voice’s command…and was instantly sorry. The movement triggered a series of deep, chest-cleaving coughs that brought tears to his eyes.
When the barrage finally subsided, he was left with no strength and a wheeze that grated against his windpipe every time he breathed. It was so excruciating, he almost wished he were back in the agony of his dream.
Then he peered at his tormenter. Cynthia stood over him, wafting the steam from some minty concoction toward him.
She looked like she’d bargained with the devil…and lost. Dark smudges ringed her eyes. Her features were pinched, her skin so translucent that the freckles stood out like bloodstains on linen. In short, she looked like he felt.
There were tears on her cheeks. He would have asked her what was wrong, swallowing against the pain of wetting his throat to speak, but she brushed the back of her hand across her face, wiping them away.
He drew in three more tortuous breaths. His heart pounded sluggishly in his throat and temples. His belly felt empty, besieged, as if underminers had collapsed the wall of his stomach. They must have beaten him as well, for every bone in his body throbbed.
And then he realized why she wept.
She’d used her sight. She’d seen his fate.
He was going to die. She’d felt it, sensed it with her magic.
