Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Sebastian’s boots slammed against the headland, each step a punishment he’d earned. Wind tore at him, strove to shove him back. He pushed harder.
Summer was coming, yet his mouth tasted like ash and winter.
Aurelia was leaving. Right now. This moment. While he strode like a madman toward a lighthouse that never had anything to offer but his own damned reflection in the glass!
When he returned to Ravenhall, she would be gone.
And Christ, he’d let her walk out.
Stood there like a stone-faced bastard while she’d looked at him with those eyes—the ones that had always seen him instead of the title, the house, the convenient arrangement—and he’d said nothing.
Done nothing.
Because the truth was lodged somewhere between his chest and throat, choking him—he didn’t want an heir from her anymore. He wanted her. Her ridiculous sunshine in his gloomy days. The way she’d touch him like he was something precious instead of something broken.
What a fool he’d been to think she would stay with him no matter what she discovered about him. He’d presumed the bonds of matrimony would be far greater for her than they necessitated being for him.
Well, she had proven that wrong, hadn’t she?
And now he was alone the way he was destined to be, walking toward the lighthouse—his monument to failure, his confession in stone and glass. It rose against the bruising sky like an accusation. Catherine had died here. Chosen the rocks and the sea because living with him had become too unbearable.
Now Aurelia.
His fault. All of it, his own goddamned fault.
If only he’d just committed to being with her, whatever life threw at them. Then, when Redwood cast his dye, no doubt born from his own assumptions of what he would do with a low-born wife, Sebastian could have torn the man’s throat out with words. Could have defended her. Chosen her.
That realization stung him far deeper than the bustling wind and hail ever could. All she wanted was to be chosen.
Instead, he’d chosen this. Cowardice dressed up as pragmatism.
Instead, this.
Fool. You spectacular fool.
The gale picked up, vicious now, and he turned his face into it. Let it punish him. Below, waves threw themselves against rocks with the kind of violence he felt clawing inside his ribs. He had no desire to jump, but he could not fathom returning to an empty home.
His chest felt as though she had clawed out his heart and left a bloody mess in its place. He was all mangled flesh and shattered bone, and she had taken the only good part of him with her.
Sebastian sank onto the grass beside the lighthouse. Wind keened around the tower like something mourning. On the horizon, storm clouds gathered, moving closer.
In the end, Aurelia went to Lady Mary Ann’s house, largely because, for all her talking, she had nowhere to go. All her other friends—however few they may have been—were from before her tenure as a duchess and did not have the capacity to house her or her things.
Mary Ann was drinking tea in the drawing room when she arrived, and the girl jumped up, open distress clouding her face.
“Dearest! I hadn’t expected you would ever want to see me after Lord Redwood arrived yesterday. How can I ever tell you how sorry I am?” She wrung her hands. Her father dozed by the fire, oblivious to everything that happened around him.
Aurelia rather suspected that was the usual way of things.
“I never expected him to arrive. Or the Duchess of Fenwick, either, but Papa insisted I invite her—they were friends back in the day. He knew her before her marriage.” She grimaced.
“And I rather suspect they knew each other after her marriage, if you catch my meaning. He was perfectly devoted to Mother when he finally met her, but he was somewhat older by then, as you may have guessed.”
By Aurelia’s estimation, he had to have been at least fifty before siring his only daughter, which made him rather older than the usual father—although such matches were not entirely unusual.
Aurelia led her friend through to the carriage with her things piled atop it. Now she was here, she felt the rashness of her actions. Packing to leave him for good when she had nowhere else to go—and assuming that she would have a place with Mary Ann.
Sebastian had just let her leave.
He had not apologized for not intending to keep her—instead, he had insisted it was not something she should concern herself with, as though a husband intending to throw his wife out when she bore him a babe was a trivial matter.
How could she ever forgive him?
Did she want to? Just as everyone else in her life after her mother’s passing, he had failed to fight for her.
“Oh, duchess,” Mary Ann breathed, one hand over her mouth. “What’s happened?”
“I left him,” Aurelia mumbled, the words sounding somehow far more puerile when she let them out into the world.
Mary Ann’s eyes widened a touch. “You left the duke?”
“I took everything from the house that I own, and I told him that if he tried to stop me, he would have lost me forever.”
Her friend shook her head, blonde curls bouncing. “But why? Because of Lord Redwood? Was the duke so angry that he was in attendance?”
Sebastian had been angry, but he’d had no grounds for it; if he hadn’t wanted her to speak with the earl, then he could have come along. And it transpired Lord Redwood was telling her the truth regardless.
What else was she to do?
“I left him,” Aurelia repeated. “Not the other way around. He would have kept me if he could. But—”
Mary Ann took Aurelia’s hand, leading her to a small parlor. “Here, in case we wake Papa. Now, tell me everything.”
So Aurelia did. She told her friend about her circumstances before her marriage, and the means by which Sebastian had married her. “He neglected to so much as turn up to the wedding; he sent a proxy. And Mr. Arnold is a lovely man, but he is not the man I wished to marry.”
“The man you wished to marry is the duke.”
“Yes. No! I-I don’t know.” Aurelia paced the small space. “For the longest time, I thought he resented me and my presence in the house. He resisted every change I wanted to make, and it was as though he wished I were gone. But little by little, I contrived to make him like me. Or so I thought.”
Mary Ann gaped at her. “How do you not see it?”
“See what?”
“Of course he likes you—the man adores you! Even I can see that. The way he looks at you. No man can feign that, dearest.”
“So you say, but he fully intended to send me away once I was with child.” And Aurelia explained the rest of Sebastian’s plans. How, no matter how they might have changed now, he had fully intended to live separately from her for the rest of their lives.
“Taking lovers, no doubt,” she finished, a little tearfully. The thought of Sebastian with any other lady made her feel sick to the stomach, even if she never went back to him. “And living happily without me. But I doubt he would like it if I did the same.”
“Well…” Mary Ann said slowly, “I don’t think it would come to that. But if it did, he could have no say over the way you lived.”
“I expect he thinks he has every right to.”
“He can think what he likes; that doesn’t change the facts.” Mary Ann came to join her by the window, where clouds were gathering ominously on the horizon. A wall of black that reminded her of the terrible storm that had washed away so much of the village.
“If he is the one to cast you aside, and if he lives as he pleases, surely then you can too.” She turned back to Aurelia, looking at her with a seriousness that ate away at her.
“Consider it. You could take lovers, if you so chose. I know that is a thing some widows do, and some married ladies. If he does the same, then who is saying you cannot?”
“The standards of the ton, no doubt.” Aurelia sighed. “Although if I am to be cast aside, it’s not as though I would ever be welcome there. I am not welcome in the ton as it is. So who would care what I did?”
Except—she would care.
And she had no desire to take on another man as a lover. Sebastian may have played fast and loose with their wedding vows, but she had no intention of doing so.
Would he if she left now? She didn’t know if he would have done so at the beginning, when he didn’t know her and still intended to send her away. But surely, since then, something had to have changed?
“He cares about you,” Mary Ann emphasized softly. “You have every right to be angry—but consider how much he has changed for you. He re-entered the village, and perhaps that wasn’t for you, but I think it was because of you.”
“In what manner?”
“After our little excursions in the village, I befriended some of the commonfolk down in Swanstone. There is hardly anything else to do in such an isolated place. I spoke to people who have known him for some time, and he has always spent his time alone in his home. But since marrying you, he has ventured out more than ever. When I first met him, we were walking by the sea! And you said he had cared for you when you had fallen sick.”
Heavens, that felt like a long time ago now. She had almost been a different person then, and so had Sebastian. Yet when he cared for her, when he insisted on caring for her even though servants were already looking after her, that was the moment things truly began to change for them.
“I don’t know what to feel,” she admitted.
“Stay here for now,” Mary Ann coaxed, taking her hands swiftly. “Lord knows I could do with the company. Then, when you’ve had some time to think, you can make a decision.”
The sky crackled darker than ever.
The problem was, she was rapidly concluding, she loved Sebastian, despite all his faults. He had hurt her, yes, and she had needed space to think. Some part of her had also wanted to punish him—if he had originally planned to send her away, then away she would go, and see how he liked that!
But life without him held no appeal. It would merely serve as a penance on the only man she knew would feel penance over her absence.
Yes, she was deathly afraid he would toss her aside if he ever tired of her, but would leaving serve—
In the far distance, lightning flashed. Both Aurelia and Mary Ann jolted.
It felt like her own raw feelings had ascended from her body and now frolicked in the sky.
“Another storm.” Mary Ann shuddered as she too watched the darkening horizon. “I do hope this one doesn’t cause too much damage and no one is caught out in it—”
Aurelia’s blood suddenly turned to ice.
Sebastian.
Hours ago, before she had fled here with her wounded pride and her carpetbag, he had been heading straight for the lighthouse.
And she had watched until he was nothing but a dark shape against the cliffhead.
She had been so full of hurt and rage that she’d even hoped he would feel every miserable second of the chill.
But now, he might still be out there…
She shot to her feet, chair scraping back.
“Aurelia?”
She could survive him not loving her. God help her, she had been surviving it—had survived being unwanted her entire life. She knew that pain. She could endure it.
But she could not survive losing him.
Not to a storm. Not to that lighthouse. Not when the last words between them had been angry and afraid and wrong.
Not when she loved him so desperately it felt like dying.
“I have to—” Her voice broke.
If something happened to him all because they had argued and he had left the house, she would never forgive herself. She couldn’t bear it. She wouldn’t.
“I have to go,” she breathed.
Mary Ann frowned. “Go where?”
“To my husband.”
She hastened out of the room. The servants were still unpacking her things, taking them to a spare room, as directed by Mary Ann’s housekeeper.
Aurelia paused only long enough to take a coat, then she barreled out of the door, rain lashing her face like tiny whips, stinging her eyes until she could barely see.
But still, she ran.