Svetlana trembled, but not from the gusting cold nor from the violent scene. Somehow through it all she’d felt utterly calm watching Wynn’s barely restrained fury come within an inch of release, knowing he exerted complete control. Nothing was going to happen without him allowing it. Seeing him for the first time since their confrontation was what sent uncertainty shaking along her nerves. The ice crackled around her heart as it yearned for his nearness, while her head shouted for fortification around its beating vulnerabilities.
Hatless as usual, his hair waved unfettered in the breeze while the richness of his brown suit set off the gold in his eyes to perfection. Eyes that took her in with that efficient manner of his where nothing remained hidden. He reached for her hand. “You’re shivering. Let’s get you inside.”
Exposed under that penetrating gaze, she angled away from his touch. It would undo her. “What are you doing here?”
His attention drifted from her face to her left ear. A hazy smile pulled at his lips. “Those are the earrings I gave you. I told you that I’d—”
“—captured a star.”
“Captured a star that had shrunk in the presence of your beauty. I also said—”
“We said many things that night.” Svetlana tugged at the curls she’d tried to cover her ears with that morning. A vain effort. Why of all her earrings could she not help herself from choosing these?
“I meant every one of them. I still do.”
Another shard of ice fractured off her heart. She imagined the pain of his duplicity seeping into the crack, hurting her all over again. “Do not avoid the question with an entanglement of emotions.”
“Loving you isn’t an entanglement. It’s a privilege.”
“Then you should not have endangered it by withholding information vital to our future.” Lies in a royal court or chandelier-graced parlor she could swat off with a flick of her glittering fan, but a lie from the man she had most trusted could not so easily be discarded.
He sighed. A weary, wordless sound that her tired soul recognized. “I wasn’t going to come today. It might’ve raised too many questions, and I didn’t want you put on the spot to answer them. Unfortunately, a summons from Glasgow forces me to crash your event.” He scowled down the road where Sergey had disappeared. “Though not a moment too late.”
She could not care less about Sergey at that moment. “The medical board?”
“Last hearing. They’ll be making a formal decision at the end. I won’t ask you to come, but I wouldn’t say no if you wanted to.”
Svetlana noticed his overnight valise strapped behind the saddle on his horse, tethered a few feet away. Her stomach dropped. “Are you leaving now?”
“It starts tomorrow morning. I think they like to let me know last minute in hopes I won’t show up.” He grinned, but it wasn’t convincing. His life’s work hung in the balance. “I know things have been strained between us of late and I take full responsibility. My pride and ambitions have hurt the people I care for most. My patients. Our tenants. You. I want to do what’s best by all of you. For us.”
She longed to hold him, to tell him she needed him and that she believed justice was on his side. Not because he was a surgeon or a duke, but because her life was incomplete without him. His words rocked against her anger, but pride bolstered her defenses and sealed off the confession.
“I believe you, but what has fractured between us cannot be mended so easily.”
“But it can be mended. Tell me it can, please.”
“I-I wish I could be certain.”
“At least it’s not a no.”
He kissed her gently on the cheek, no more than a whisper of saddened regrets, and then he was gone. Svetlana stood in the schoolyard long after, impervious to the cold air. An ache swirled inside where her heart hung heavy in her chest like a broken pendulum.
Chapter 30
Svetlana padded along the corridor, the stone floor cold beneath her satin slippers. All of Thornhill was fast asleep as she found uncertainties troubling her mind after having received a reply from Mrs. Roscoe along with a sealed report from St. Matthew’s. She would need to send it by special messenger to Glasgow first thing in the morning if it was to have any hope of reaching Wynn’s trial in time.
Steering clear of the Grand Hall and its ghostly memories of dancing in Wynn’s arms, she wandered into the far back reaches of the house where the floors and walls turned into a more contemporary wood style. Contemporary, at least, in comparison to the hodge-podge sixteenth- and seventeenth-century parts of the castle.