Chapter 55
Chapter 55:
Edmund, who was standing beside Lara with her hand in his.
Edmund, who had just dismantled twenty years of devotion with a few sentences.
Edmund, who was calm, who was composed, who was wearing a suit that cost more than Declan’s first racing car and a face that showed no fear.
Declan swung.
The punch was a racer’s punch — all torque and no technique, delivered with the full-body commitment of a man who had spent his career turning physical energy into forward motion and was now directing that energy at the jaw of a man he’d met twice. It came fast, unannounced, with the desperate velocity of a person who had run out of everything except the ability to hit something.
Edmund could have dodged it.
This was the detail that Lara would think about later — in the quiet hours of the evening, in the bedroom at the Ashworth estate, turning the scene over in her mind.
Edmund could have dodged it. His reflexes were fast — she’d seen him move, seen the speed of his hands when he caught a falling glass at dinner, seen the way his body responded to sudden stimulus with the calibrated quickness of a man who had trained or been trained. He could have stepped aside, and the punch would have sailed past his cheek, and Declan would have stumbled, and the scene would have been different.
Instead, Edmund turned his head. Slightly. Just enough to convert a direct hit into a graze — to let Declan’s fist skim his cheekbone, producing a red mark without producing damage. Not a dodge. Not an acceptance.
A calculation.
He let himself be hit.
And then — rubbing his cheek, wincing with exactly the right degree of visible discomfort, his composure intact but his vulnerability displayed — he turned to Lara with the face of a man who had just been struck and was choosing not to retaliate.
“Ah—” A small sound. Pained.
Authentic enough to be convincing, controlled enough to be strategic. He touched his cheek. The mark was blooming — red, visible, photogenic.
“It’s nothing,” he said. Smiled. The smile cost him something — or appeared to cost him something, which was the same thing. “It doesn’t hurt p>
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Lara’s reaction was instant.
Her hand found his. Her other hand reached for his face — gently, carefully, with the specific tenderness of a woman whose protective instincts had just been activated by the sight of someone she cared about being hurt. She tried to examine the mark.
Edmund held her hand against his cheek instead, keeping it there, turning the medical examination into something else: an intimacy, a connection, a moment that said more than any word about where her priorities now lived.
She turned to Declan.
And the expression on her face — the cold, sharp, reproachful fury of a woman who had just watched the man she’d grown up with throw a punch at the man she’d married — was the thing that finally broke Declan Thorne.
“Declan! Why did you hit him?” Her voice was ice. Not the CEO’s ice of Callum, not the strategic ice of Edmund — the ice of a woman who was protecting someone and was furious at the person who’d made protection necessary. “When did you become this? Since when do you solve things with violence p>
The reproach hit Declan like a physical blow — harder than any punch he’d thrown, harder than any crash he’d survived.
Because the words contained something worse than anger: disappointment. The specific, devastating disappointment of a woman who’d once believed in him and was now watching that belief dissolve.
And beneath the disappointment, the thing that Declan couldn’t unsee: Lara hadn’t addressed what he’d said. She hadn’t responded to his offer — the offer to run away, to go abroad, to do anything, to give up everything. She’d heard him propose his entire future and had responded by examining Edmund’s cheek.