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‘You must not be upset,’ he said stiffly. ‘This is for the best.’
No, it’s not.
‘I need to be alone for a while,’ she murmured.
He caught her wrist as she tried to leave. ‘Cara, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I thought you understood I can’t offer you that.’
A spark of anger fired in her chest, and she clung to it. Anything to disguise the pain. ‘You said to me once, Maxim, that you didn’t need my pity,’ she managed. ‘I don’t need yours either.’
She’d exposed herself to these feelings by accepting so little from him. And if this pain could teach her one thing, it was never to accept so little again.
‘Where are you going?’ he said from behind her as she walked away from him.
‘To my rooms. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t disturb me tonight,’ she said, her voice coming from far away, as it occurred to her for the first time ever that she was glad they had separate bedrooms.
She couldn’t make him love her. And she didn’t want to. He’d seduced her with sex, but she had let him, revelling in the physical and wanting it to mean more when it never had. At least to him. All she could do now was repair her broken, foolishly misguided heart.
‘Don’t do anything foolish, Cara,’ he said. ‘We can talk more about this in the morning.’
She pressed her hand to her stomach, imagining the life inside her. And acknowledged how pathetically eager she would have been to take him up on the offer to talk about their relationship only minutes before. Why had she been prepared to accept whatever scraps of affection he was prepared to offer her?
She didn’t feel tired as she headed up the stairs to her rooms, she felt exhausted, her feet like lumps of lead as she trudged up each step.
But one thing she did know: there was nothing left to talk about.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘MONSIEUR DURAND, MADAME asked me to give you this.’
Maxim glanced up from his breakfast—the breakfast he hadn’t been able to eat—to find the young maid he had fired the day before, and then reinstated because none of this was her fault, holding an envelope in her hand.
It was ten o’clock and he’d barely slept last night. He’d wanted to go to Cara’s rooms a dozen times during the night, to soothe her and beg her to forgive him for his harsh words. To hold her in his arms and take the shattered pain in her eyes away the only way he knew how, by bringing her to the peak of ecstasy and watching her revel in her own pleasure. A pleasure only he could give her.
But he knew he couldn’t, because that would only give her more false hope.
When she had told him last night of her childhood, the home she had been denied, all he’d been able to think about was her as a little girl, shunted from family to family without anywhere to belong. He’d wanted to hurt every single person who had rejected that little girl, had made her believe she wasn’t enough.
But how could he punish them when he’d hurt her more? And made her believe she was the one who wasn’t enough when it had always, always been him.
‘Merci, Antoinette,’ he said, remembering the girl’s name and taking the envelope. ‘Is my wife awake then?’ he asked as he sliced open the envelope with his knife.
‘The mistress woke hours ago, sir,’ she said. ‘She left at about nine o’clock.’
‘She...left?’ His fingers paused on the letter. ‘Where did she go?’ The hollow weight in his stomach turned into a sharp slice of panic.
‘I do not know,’ Antoinette said. ‘She told me not to give you this letter, though, until ten o’clock. I think she took a car; she said she was going for a drive.’
No. No. No. No.
He flicked open the letter the girl had handed to him and read the words written in black ink.
Maxim,
I’m sorry I can’t be the wife you need. I think it is best in the circumstances if we divorce now.
I cannot bear to live with you and know you feel nothing for me, when I feel so much for you.
I hope you understand.
