Page 78 of A Virgin for the Duke of Thorns

“Drinking directly is also good enough.”

Colin grinned at the most stoic member of their group. “Exactly!”

As he drank, the liquor burned a path down his throat. He wished it would burn away that beating organ in his chest as well.

Because even if he pretended that it meant nothing, even if he shouted from the rooftops that none of it mattered, it all did.

In the stillness of his thoughts, he could still hear her, feel her. He would always see the hurt in her eyes and the tears she dared not spill before him.

She would always be the only woman who mattered to him, the only one he would ever allow into his heart.

Even if he could not have her stay by his side forever, he would always hold her right there where losing her hurt the most.

CHAPTER 32

Shakespeare was right—the course of true love never did run smooth.

Alice had initially anticipated a few bumps along the way. She had thought that she knew well enough to stay out of the sort of trouble that would wreck her heart and hopes upon the rocks. Who would have thought that she would fall prey to it still?

It truly was a sobering thought.

“Alice?”

She looked up to find her sister already dressed in her traveling clothes, complete with a matching bonnet. Phoebe’s lovely features creased into a soft smile.

“Mama said we should be heading downstairs any moment now,” her younger sister told her quietly.

Alice turned away from the window that afforded her a view of the front door of Fitzroy Hall, where carriages had begun to line up to take the guests back home. The house party was over, and so was the farce between her and Colin.

The last game from yesterday was an archery contest, as Scarlett had guessed, but neither she nor the other Wolves participated in it. She had heard from Evie that the four men had been holed up in Colin’s study and were in no state to be fit company for impressionable young ladies.

A rather circumspect way of saying that they were all probably inebriatedColin is probably celebrating adding another notch to his bedpost.

In the end, that was all she had amounted to—just another conquest of his. Just another statistic in the countless women he had wooed and bedded. She would have been thoroughly embarrassed if she was not so heartbroken.

She stood up and smoothed her skirts with a self-conscious smile. “I am ready.”

Phoebe nodded and looped her arm through Alice’s, and they walked down the hall in companionable silence. Alice did not even dare to look back to the room across from the one she had occupied the past handful of days. She could not bear to.

When both sisters stepped out of the front door to where their parents stood beside their waiting carriage, Alice paused and looked up to the skies and found the sun so dazzlingly bright that it hurt to look at it.

Colin had been the same thing. For a while, she had looked at him as one would look at something so magnificent that she could not look away no matter how much it hurt her. Like Icarus, she had flown too close to the sun, and for her hubris, she had been scorched so much so that there was nothing left to even fall into the ocean.

She felt, simply, as if she had turned into ashes and dust.

* * *

There was no headache worse than one suffered after a night of intoxication.

When Colin stumbled past his door late that morning, the guests had already begun to leave. His grandmother and Evie did not even bother to rouse him to help them see their guests off.

His gaze flicked to the door right across the rooms he had occupied for the weekend and found that it was slightly ajar. That could only mean one thing—it was now unoccupied.

Immediately, he felt a quickening in his chest, and he walked hurriedly down the grand staircase. Had Alice and her family already left? Did she not even bother to let him know, somehow, that she was going away?

When he reached the front door, he found his grandmother and Evie walking back in. Both ladies looked a little fatigued but none the worse for wear after playing hostesses for the whole weekend.

The Dowager Countess’s gaze was particularly sharp as it landed on him. “Oh,” she said simply. “I was beginning to wonder when you would deign to join the land of the living.”

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