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 mouthfull,” 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, withhim. I have never seen you so at ease.”
She opened her mouth to protest, to tell him that hemighthave heard her laugh that way, or seen her at ease inhiscompany, 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 kingof 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—forbidyou—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 coursesshe 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—ornotenjoying—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 awfulmen. 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.
