“Enjoy,” she murmured. As Jack passed through the door, she added. “And . . . thank you.”
He looked over his shoulder, the uncomfortable expression once again on his face. “For what?”
“Acting like a father.”
A flicker of emotion cracked his gruff exterior. “Th-that’s what I am. Like it or not, I’m your father.”
She smiled at him, surprised at how easy it was to do. “I like it.”
He shifted on his feet, clearly uncomfortable with what amounted to her praise. “Don’t tarry. You need to eat.”
She nodded. “I’ll be along soon.”
With a nod of his own, he turned from the room.
She watched him walk from sight before moving back into the parlor and dropping onto an overstuffed chair, convinced she could fall asleep and spend the night right there.
“Grier.”
Opening her eyes, her heart skipped to life to see Sev crossing the threshold. She shot upright. “Sev.”
He stopped before her chair. Squatting down before her, he took her chilled hand into his own. “Are you all right?”
She gave a wavery smile, her heart softening at the concern in his voice. “Fine.” She looked down at his large hand clasped in her own. “Fine now any rate.” She released a pent-up breath. Just how true that was frightened her. In a mere moment his presence could put all her troubles to rest.
“Who was that man?”
She waved a hand dismissively, hoping he would not force the topic of Trevis. “No one.”
“Clearly not no one.”
“His name is Trevis Powell.”
“Who is he to you?”
A muscle rippled the skin of his jaw and that dark look came back into his eyes. “He touched you with much familiarity,” he added in a thick voice.
“He’s no one to me,” she insisted. “Let us just leave it at that.”
“How do you come to know him? What was he doing here? He was looking for you specifically.”
“After my father passed on, I stayed on as his gamekeeper. He came here to convince me to go back with him.”
Sev’s lion eyes narrowed. “And why would he want you to do that?”
“Because he thought I would want to,” she hedged, looking down at her lap where their fingers clung to each other. Sev’s fingers tightened the slightest amount around hers, clearly dissatisfied with her vague response.
“Grier,” he prompted.
She sighed and continued, relenting to the embarrassing truth. “He learned that I’m an heiress now. He wants my money—or rather Jack’s. The same as every other man that pays me the slightest heed.” She snorted. “Well, except you. To the rest I’m simply a fat banknote.”
“He proposed to you then?”
She nodded. “Only he’s lacking the required title to meet Jack’s criteria . . . oh, and there’s the fact that I can’t stomach the sight of him. That, too. Those factors make it hard to accept an offer of marriage from such a man.”
“I sense bitterness in you. Why do you dislike him so much? Did he do . . . something to you?”
She inhaled a bracing breath. “He promised to marry me for years.”
His fingers almost hurt where they wrapped around hers. “Are you in love with him?”
“No! God, no! He’s a wretch. I was just inexperienced. It took me a while to realize what he truly was. When I did I left Wales. I couldn’t stay on.”
“What happened?”
“For years he kept me dangling on a hook with the promise of marriage.” She winced, thinking how foolish she’d been to ever believe him. To ever even want him. “Finally he admitted he could never marry me. He confessed to my face that I was beneath him and that he must marry someone respectable. Someone with a dowry.” She laughed lightly. “But he didn’t want me to be totally disappointed. He kindly offered to keep me on as his game master, so long as I agreed to be his mistress. A role he thought me aptly suited for.” She lifted one shoulder. “And that’s when I decided I would leave Wales. Jack’s summons came not a moment too soon.”
Sev growled beneath his breath. “Bastard.”
She looked him steadily in the face. “And why would you say that? He’s not so unlike you. You’ve offered me nothing but a place in your bed.” Even as she uttered the words, she regretted them, knew them to be untrue. He was nothing like Trevis. He possessed responsibilities too great to let himself take her for a wife. She knew he cared for her, that he would consider her for a wife if he could.
Sev blinked, his hand loosening around hers. “If that’s how you see me, why are you even talking to me? Why even let me touch you?”
Because I love you . The realization stunned her, knocked the wind loose from her chest and filled her with raw panic. It only confirmed in her mind what she had to do. She blinked, fighting back the burn in her eyes. She couldn’t break down and weep now. She had to end this before they became any more entangled. Before it became impossible to walk away.
“Good question,” she replied through numb lips. As much as it hurt to say the words, they needed to be said. “This can’t continue. We can’t.”
Every moment with him pushed her closer to ruin. To say nothing of the danger to her heart. As much as severing with him hurt, if she delayed any longer she might not be able to extricate herself at all. She’d be lost to him. And she didn’t want to make this any harder for him either. He had a duty to perform. It impacted thousands of people, an entire country. She couldn’t be so selfish as to put her own desires first.
As if burned from the touch of her, he dropped his hand completely from hers and rose to his full looming height. Her gaze drifted up to his face, drinking in the sight of him as if it were her last. And essentially it was. The next time she saw him, there would be nothing between them.
He stared down at her so impassively, the old prince, austere and unfeeling again.
She licked her lips. “Good-bye, Sevastian.”
He didn’t move for the longest moment. She held her breath, willing him to leave. Willing him to stay .
Finally, without a word, he turned on his heels and departed the room with solid steps.
She released the breath she had been holding and remained in her chair, as still as stone for several moments, the ticking clock on the mantel timing the seconds it took her heart to break.
A sob broke from her lips and she collapsed, dropping her head into her shuddering lap. It didn’t take long at all.
Chapter Twenty
Sev strode toward the front door of the inn, ignoring his cousin calling to him from a table to let him know their dinner waited.
He welcomed the hard bite of winter on his cheeks as he stepped out into the windswept yard, relishing any discomfort the cold brought, hoping it helped mask the uncomfortable knotting in his gut. Perhaps anyone who looked at him would fail to notice that he’d been struck a blow.
She’d ended it. Their affair.
Them .
He burrowed deeper within his jacket, realizing he should have grabbed his long coat but not about to go back for it. He was in no mood for people. He was especially in no mood to face her again.
His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. She’d walked away from him when they were only just starting to enjoy each other. They were just . . . beginning. What, precisely, he couldn’t say, but something more than an illicit, sordid affair. For the first time in his life, he’d felt himself with another person. Himself. Sevastian. Not the crown prince, or war hero. He’d felt like he could be his true self with her.
And with a word, she’d killed that.
His hands opened and shut at his sides at the memory of her silken skin. He hadn’t done half the things he wished to do to her yet. He hadn’t heard half the things he wanted to hear from her lips yet . . .
This last thought jarred him. Since when did he long to hear a woman talk . . . to spill her soul to him?
His hands unclenched. They weren’t finished. He’d had affairs aplenty before and walked away with no regrets, with no painful knotting in his stomach. But this—Grier. They weren’t done. She was sorely mistaken if she thought she’d seen the last of him.
At that moment a man emerged from the stables tugging on his gloves and adjusting his hat upon his head. A groom led a horse before him.
A low growl rose from the back of his throat as he recognized the man from Grier’s past. The man she thought to compare him to. They were nothing alike. Sev would never be fool enough to let her go. Not if he truly wanted her. And he did.
She said she didn’t love the man, but Sev wondered if that was true. Was that why his arrival today hurt her so much? Was that why she ended their affair?
Had seeing Powell reminded her that she cared for him? More than whatever feelings she harbored for Sev?
She turned down his proposal , a voice reminded in the back of his mind. She couldn’t still want him.
At the thought of that proposal, that this man hoped to claim Grier for his wife, Sev’s vision clouded with a rage he’d never felt before. Not even in the heat of battle, when his blood pumped so hard all thought fled and he only acted.
He strode quick, hard strides across the yard. Without a word, he grabbed Trevis Powell’s shoulder and whirled him around.
Powell didn’t have time to speak before Sev planted his fist in his face with a satisfying crunch.
The man staggered, but didn’t fall. He glared at Sev over the hand he held to his afflicted cheek. “What the bloody hell was that for?”
“For thinking you could come back here and claim her after you threw her away.”
The bewilderment gradually cleared from his eyes. “Ah, got to you, too, did she? There’s certainly something about her, isn’t there? She has a way about her. I should know. I tried for years to get beneath her skirts. I think it’s that lovely mouth. Makes a man imagine the places he’d like her to put it.”
Sev growled and took a menacing step toward him.
Powell held up a hand to ward him off while his other hand fingered his tender cheek. “No need for violence, chap. She’s just a bit of common trash.”
“Bastard!” With a roar, Sev charged him like a bull and knocked him to the ground. They rolled, throwing punches and striking each other wherever their fists could connect. He felt nothing, registered no pain. Each crack of bone on bone fueled his fury, egging him further.
Sev gained the advantage and pinned Powell to the cold ground, striking him again and again.
“Sev! Sev! Stop!”
Malcolm was there, pulling on him with two grooms, grunting as they tried to haul him off the bloodied man.
Sev blinked and looked around. A crowd had gathered. The dowager’s houseguests gawked at him with sagging mouths, their breaths smoky puffs on the cold night air. He cared for none of them. His gaze sought only one.
He found her, standing just inside the threshold, for once looking pale as milk. Her face was leached of all color beneath her sun-browned skin. He freckles stood out in stark relief, and something almost painful knifed near his heart.
She looked from him to Powell writhing on the ground. When her gaze found him again, her eyes gleamed bright with disapproval.
He didn’t flinch, didn’t show the slightest sign of regret for his actions. He’d beat the bastard to a pulp again for speaking of her so crudely . . . for hurting her.
She hugged herself but he somehow doubted it was the cold that made her embrace herself so tightly. Her sister stood beside her, gripping her arm in a gesture of support. As if he’d done something wrong.
He stared at Grier, wiping the blood from his lip with the back of his hand, indifferent to who watched him and what they thought of the Crown Prince of Maldania tussling in the dirt outside an inn like a common peasant.