Page 69 of Her Wily Duke

“I overheard the whole conversation,” she said, eyeing the cups warily. “Benedict wasn’t jesting. He said that he had stopped giving me the potion because he felt bad about doing so.”

“That was unusually magnanimous of him,” said Lord Jasper. He studied her face in silence. “When you were under the spell of the potion, did he—”

“Did he what?”

“You know.”

Ariana did know, and she was mortified that Lord Jasper would think to ask such a question. Her cheeks heated, and she looked away, staring into the fire.

“No, he was oddly courteous through it all,” she said, though her stomach was beginning to twist into painful knots. “He never gave me so much as a goodnight kiss.”

Reaching for his own cup, Lord Jasper rose and strode to the easel.

“Strange for a man to have you in his possession and not take advantage of the fact.”

“Would you have done things differently in his position?”

“I’m not saying that I would have. I just know what most men would do. There’s generally only one reason to give a woman a love potion, and it doesn’t involve a happier marriage. He’s a better man than your average husband.”

There might have been some truth to this, though Ariana didn’t think she was ready to hear it. As she had trudged through the sleet on her way here, Benedict had grown in her mind to grotesque proportions, until he seemed all-powerful and inescapable. She was about to comment on Lord Jasper’s observation when her eyes fell on a bright object half-buried under a pile of papers on another side table. Her blood froze.

It was a lapis blue pendant necklace.

“Jasper,” she asked slowly, “where did you get that?”

She pointed with shaking fingers towards the necklace. Jasper leaned over and brushed the papers aside for a better look at where she pointed, then his face curled into an ominous smile.

“Come with me to the river,” he said finally, reaching for his greatcoat. “There are some things we need to talk about.”

“But it’s freezing!”

The sound of the rain gave emphasis to her words. She didn’t want to go anywhere with him, not until he explained himself.

“It wasn’t a suggestion,” said Lord Jasper coldly, in the same level tone. “Come with me.”

Chapter Thirteen

The rain had subsided into a heavy drizzle by the time they left the cottage, a bitter wind blowing the storm onwards across the hills.

After he had forcibly pulled her along for the first part of the way, Ariana stopped fighting, and simply followed numbly as Lord Jasper led them along the thread of the river, wondering if perhaps she had made a mistake in leaving Darkmire Abbey. What had seemed clearly the only way to proceed had become far less clear, the longer she spent in his company.

The twilight had deepened into almost night, and the darkness left her feeling lost and afraid, filled with deep foreboding. Lord Jasper had been making her feel uneasy even before she saw the necklace – the one she had given to David so long ago, the necklace that he had been wearing just a few hours before she’d found his body lying face-down in the river. She almost didn’t want to ask again how Lord Jasper had come to have it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

“We’re here,” said Lord Jasper.

They had come to the bend in the river shaded by the spreading yew tree, its gnarled old branches and deep dark foliage seeming stark amongst the ghostly glimmers of the piled remnants of hail in the darkness, the cold of the wintry whiteness. He paused at the edge of the cliff, grimly surveying the river and the barely visible rocks near the ford at the end of the ravine.

It was the last place in the world Ariana wanted to be at this hour. She was standing where, near three years before, she had looked over the cliff to see her worst nightmare. Standing not far from the spot where she had found David’s body.

“Why are we here?”

She made a heroic attempt to sound calm, but panic had crept into her voice.

“Because I want you to understand,” he said, “why I did what I had to do.”

Removing the necklace from the inside of the shirt, he tossed it onto the ground at Ariana’s feet.

But she was in no hurry to pick it up.