“Because I am the age I am. Because even if I were younger, I could never give you what you’ll want. Because I’ve never loved a man as I love you. I love you enough that I want only what’s best for you.”
He said quietly, “You’re a generous woman, but I don’t believe you’re that generous.”
Diana tossed her head backward in mock laughter. “Oh, all right, caught in another falsehood. I do want what’s best for you, but I’m not making a sacrifice. It’s all self-interest. I know you love me now, but in a year, or two years, I’m afraid you’ll begin to have doubts and regrets, and who could blame you? I would rather inflict this on myself now than have it inflicted on me later, when it will hurt ever so much more. You want it unvarnished, there you have it.”
When he grasped what she was saying—it took him a moment—he experienced a stab of panic. She’d caught him unprepared; except for her subdued mood today, she’d shown none of the usual signs of a woman who wants to call it off, given no warnings that this was coming. Or had she and he had somehow failed to recognize them?
“You’re inflicting it on me, too, not just yourself,” he said, his voice rising. “Not twenty minutes ago you asked me to kiss you like a man who loved you. Why would you—”
“I don’t know why. Must there be a rational explanation for everything?”
They rode back in an excruciating silence. Fitzhugh would have gotten out and walked if it wasn’t for the late hour and the near certainty that he’d be waylaid by bandits. He was in shock, and at the same time boiling with resentment, not only for her dropping this on him so abruptly but for her fatalism, her conviction that his feelings were destined to change and he destined to hurt her, as if he had no will of his own, no capacity to make choices.
She was staying with Tara Whitcomb. The interpreter swung through the gate to the Pathways compound and parked. Fitzhugh climbed out with Diana and took her aside.
“Maybe there aren’t explanations for everything,” he said with a kind of quiet violence, “but damn it, I am owed one for what you’re doing.”
“I have given it.”
“What are you? Some kind of prophet that you know what I’m going to do and what I’m going to feel a year from now, or two or three?”
“No, but I do have a pretty good idea.”
“Really? Or has all the talk finally gotten to you? Maybe it isn’t that you’re all wrong for me but that I’m all wrong for you.” He seized her wrist and held her arm alongside his. “See the contrast.”
She jerked free. “Do not be absurd. You don’t know me at all if you think that makes a difference to me.”
“I won’t let you do this. I won’t stand for it.” She laughed caustically at this masculine assertion, and he too had no sooner uttered it than he realized how silly it sounded. “I should have some say in it, and you’re not giving me any.”
The softening in his tone brought a softening in her—a relaxation in her posture, a slight loss of firmness in her gaze as she lowered her eyes. “Oh, but you do have a say. But you are going to have to do some hard thinking before you can say it. And when you do, you will have to say it without any doubts or equivocation, and believe me, I’ll know if there are any.”
“I will have to decide how much I can give up.”
“It would be quite a lot, I know that, and if you decide you can’t, I shall want to know that as well.”
“And if I decide I can, what then?”
Her response was a demure smile, but it was enough, and for an instant the thought that she would be his in marriage thrilled him. The feeling was strong enough that he almost declared on the spot that he’d resolved the question. The knowledge that he had not stopped him. Instead of making a declaration, he asked if, then, she was not ending it but merely calling for an intermission.
“Very well, an intermission,” she said. “And—there is no way to put this nicely—I do not want to see you till it’s over.”
As she looked up at him, she removed her hat. He observed that the twilight made the veins in her