Page 17

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

W hy insist on dinner if you are not going to say a word?

Teresa flinched at the squeak of cutlery on the plates, the steady tick-tick of the clock, the intolerable silence in between.

Since leaving the study, Cyrus had not spoken at all, other than to thank the staff for the next course.

Indeed, he could not have been sitting further away if he had tried, both at one end of an obnoxiously long dining table, the kind reserved for those who loved dinner parties, not reclusive dukes who preferred to dine alone.

After two courses, she could bear it no longer.

“Have I done something wrong?” she asked bluntly.

He looked up from his thin piece of trout. “Pardon?”

“You have joined me for dinner, yet I feel as if I am being punished,” she replied, sitting back in her chair, her appetite gone. “You have said nothing to me and, where I hail from, that usually means I have done something wrong. So, please tell me what it is so I can continue my dinner in peace.”

He dabbed the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “You have not done anything wrong. I do not talk when I eat; it is the height of bad manners.”

She frowned at the remark, remembering the gardener’s sorrowful tale of tragedy and cruelty.

The words were coming from Cyrus’ mouth, but she could not help but wonder if they were filtered through the strict voices of two others: the father and grandfather who had shaped him, and not at all gently.

“It is rude to talk with one’s mouth full ,” Teresa replied cautiously, “but it is not bad manners to talk while dining in general. If that were so, no one would have dinner parties at all. As such, I do not believe you. I think you are cross with me, and I should like to know why.”

Cyrus met her confused, somewhat disheartened gaze. For an agonizing few moments, he said nothing, until she feared he might return to that intolerable silence.

Then, with a sigh, he waved a hand at the servants in the room and dismissed them with a gruff, “Leave us, please.”

Belinda caught Teresa’s eye on her way out, offering a little nod of reassurance. About what, Teresa did not know, but she let herself savor the encouragement.

The moment the dining room door closed, and they were alone together, Cyrus got up from his distant chair and began to walk toward his wife. Teresa gulped, hastily reaching for her wine glass, and almost knocking it over as her hand shook.

He paused two seats away, turning to rest his hands on the back of the empty chair, his blue eyes staring down at a place that had not been set. “You have done nothing wrong,” he began quietly, “because I did not know the rules until tonight.”

“Rules?” She gulped down a mouthful of wine to soothe her dry throat.

He turned his head to look at her. “I have never seen you laugh the way you did tonight, with him . I have never seen you so at ease.”

She opened her mouth to protest, to tell him that he might have heard her laugh that way, or seen her at ease in his company, if he had bothered to spend time with her, but the expression on his face held her silent.

It was as if the candles in the center of the dining table had been blown out, casting a shadow across him, yet his eyes burned like the flames had been drawn into himself.

He was the Captain when his beloved Miss Savage had been given an ultimatum: save her beloved’s life by marrying the king of a far-flung nation, or watch him die if she refused. One of Teresa’s favorites.

“I told you that you could live your life however you please, but I forbid you— forbid you—to take a lover,” Cyrus growled, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the back of the chair. Any harder, and it would snap like a twig.

Teresa blinked at him, breathless. “You believe I wish to… pursue something with Silas?”

“Do not speak his name so casually.” Cyrus’ eyes flared.

“I only meant to?—”

“No man will touch you,” he said in a husky voice, his chest rising and falling with the strength of his words.

Teresa stared at him, speechless. Even with his vague explanation, she could not understand the effect upon him.

He did not care about her, he did not spend time with her, he did not seem to want to be near her, he did not speak to her, even when they were dining alone together—how could it be that he was gazing at her like that, with such fire in his eyes?

She would have named that blaze ‘jealousy,’ but that was impossible.

To be jealous, he would have had to want her for himself.

“I do not want to pursue anything,” she managed to say, discomfort roiling in her stomach, unsettling the two courses she had already eaten. “And, in truth, I am not certain I like what you are insinuating.”

Cyrus moved closer, stealing her breath away with his proximity and the… strange hunger in his eyes. “I was there, Teresa. I saw the two of you.”

“Laughing?” she scoffed, hoping to chase off the rising heat that prickled across her skin. “Jesting together? Enjoying—or not enjoying—a drink with my husband’s friend? Am I not to laugh? Am I not to have any pleasing moment in this castle at all?”

Not once had she considered taking a lover and having an affair. When she had married Cyrus, she had known what it meant, regardless of how the marriage came to pass. She was not someone who flouted her vows, and it crushed her that he could even think that about her.

“Goodness, the gall of you!” she snapped, as a week of being ignored by him swelled within her, creating a wave of fury that could not be held back.

“Was it not me who knocked on your bedchamber door? Was it not me who tried to speak to you in the carriage, on the way here? Is it not me who has attempted to seek you out all week, only to be rebuffed? Yet, you stand there and make accusations that my… loyalty has wavered?”

Cyrus stood no more than a step away, breathing hard. “I know affection when I see it.”

The gardener’s story came back to haunt Teresa, flooding her mind with visions of a terrible past, and a boy raised by awful men.

A pale, weak mother who had longed to meet her child, never able to so much as hold him, her life exchanged for his: the person who could have changed Cyrus’ fate, taken before she had the chance.

“Do you?” Teresa shot to her feet. “Well, I do not believe that is true. I do not think you would know affection if it smacked you in the face, which I am rather close to doing. Truly, I… do not know what to say to you. I am… I am appalled, Cyrus. I keep my promises, while you see fit to break them as you please.”

Guilt bristled up from her stomach, knowing it was beneath her to use his history against him…

but he did not know what she knew. And, nevertheless, it was the truth; whether it was his fault or not, he would not have known affection if it ran over him, and she did not deserve to be treated this way for the crime of…

laughing at the joke of someone who had noticed she existed.

She threw down her napkin, blowing a lock of hair out of her face.

“So, no, I do not intend to take a lover, and I am certainly not interested in your friend. Not in the romantic sense. There—you may be satisfied with that, even though it was nothing you had to command of me in the first place. I abide by my vows, but I wonder if the same can be said for you?”

His brow softened for a heartbeat, the fire in his eyes burning brighter.

Those embers gave her pause, her heart jumping as he closed that small gap between them, her mind swirling with thoughts of the kiss she had never experienced…

but as he made that final step toward her, his hand reaching up to her face, she batted it away.

“I am no longer hungry. Excuse me,” she seethed, as she turned on her heel and walked out of the room, cursing his name under her breath… and cursing the day she had exploded out of the walls to confront him, too.

Indeed, if she were to create a list, he would assuredly be at the very bottom, his name struck through a thousand times.