Page 70 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
She stood in the middle of the room.
“Do you regret that you’re marrying me?” Her voice was steady. “If so, tell me now so I can hold another auction. I cannot marry a man who is…”
“Who is what, Valeria?”
The way he said her name cracked something in her chest.
Not the word itself, but the way he held it. Carefully. The way he held everything. As though the world were made of glass and he was the man most likely to break it.
She was not glass. She was not fragile. She was a woman who had survived three years of a man who had tried to shatter her, and she was still standing. She was tired of being treated like something that might break.
“So cruel!” The word rang in the quiet room. “I thought my first husband was the worst man on earth because he took away my freedom, my speech, even my food. But you…” Her voice broke. She pressed her hand to her mouth. Took a shuddering breath. “You are keeping your company from me. I thought you valued me—not the heir, not the wife,me.. I thought maybe this time, I might have found something worth reaching for. But no.”
He was silent. His arms were still folded. She could see the tension in his forearms, the muscles taut beneath the rolled sleeves. He was holding himself together the way he held everything together—with effort, control, and the grim determination of a man who believed that letting go would break something that could not be fixed.
She was shaking. She could feel it in her hands, voice, and jaw. Three years of careful control, and this man had dismantled it in two weeks. Not with cruelty, but with kindness. With bread on her plate and turned backs and riddles in gazebos and the way he said her name as though it were the most important word in any language he spoke.
She had been trained to withstand cruelty. She had no defenses against kindness. It slithered through the cracks she did not know she had, settled there, and grew. And now she was standing in his bedroom, on the eve of their wedding, shaking like a girl, and she could not stop.
“Ye thought ye had tamed the Hound, is that it?”
“I never considered you as the Hound!” She stepped toward him. “Well, maybe when I first met you. But we’ve been through so much in the past few days, and…”
“I regret putting ye in danger,” he said, voice rough. “But I don’t regret my decision to marry ye.”
She looked at him. He looked at her. The fire crackled.
Her pulse was loud in her ears. She could feel it in her wrists, her throat, the back of her knees. He was four feet away, and she could feel the heat of him from here.
He said he does not regret it. He said he does not regret choosing to marry me.
She wanted to close the distance between them. She wanted to stay exactly where she was. She wanted him to be the one to move first, because if she moved first, she would not stop.
“Then prove it,” she demanded.
The words hung in the air between them. Three words. Simple. Ordinary. The kind of words one said to a child who claimed he could climb a tree or a friend who swore he knew the way.
But she was not saying them to a child or a friend. She was saying them to a man who was standing in a bedroom on the eve of their wedding, with his arms folded and his jaw tight and his eyes full of an emotion that was not rejection.
It was fear. She recognized fear. She had lived with it for three years.
But she was not afraid. She was done being afraid. She had been afraid of Gordon, and she had survived. She had been afraid of the auction, and she had survived. She had been afraid of the Hound, and she had survived.
She was not going to be afraid of this. Not of wanting. Not of being wanted. Not of the man standing four feet away, who was looking at her as though she were a fire and he had been cold for a very long time, and stepping closer was the most dangerous thing he had ever done.
She took a deep breath. The fire popped.
“You left,” she said. Her tone was even now. Not angry. Not wounded. Just factual. “You touched me in the drawing room, and then you left. You came to the masquerade ball, caught a threat out of the air, and punched a man in the face, and then you sat in a chair and watched me sleep. And then you left again. You have been leaving for days, Edward. Every time I get close, you leave.”
He was still standing with his arms folded, but his expression had changed. The wall was cracking. She could see it in the corners of his eyes, in the set of his mouth, in the way his chest rose and fell too fast for a man who was trying to appear calm.
“I leave because staying is dangerous,” he rasped.
“Dangerous for whom?”
“For ye.”
“I have survived three years of Gordon Hansley. I can survive you.”
