Chapter 29
Three Days Ago.
A dam had spent the entire morning buried in estate papers and trying very hard to concentrate.
The tenant accounts lay open beside correspondence from the steward, and three letters awaited his reply. There was something about a boundary dispute that needed judgment, and something about drainage had been marked twice by his secretary’s careful hand.
Adam read each page, understood some of it, and retained almost nothing. He kept dragging his eyes back to figures and names.
A knock sounded at the study door, interrupting and providing him a respite at the same time.
“Come in,” he called.
Mrs. Fenwick stepped inside, her glassy eyes smiling at him. “Your Grace, you have a visitor.”
Adam set down the letter in his hand. “Who?”
The housekeeper shifted slightly. “The Duke of Salbury.”
He was on his feet before she had finished speaking the name.
What in God’s name?
“Where is he?”
“In the morning room, Your Grace.”
Adam crossed the hallway at once and found Dominic waiting by the window.
The man remained standing with nothing but a look of determination on his face. Whatever he had come here to do, Adam was certain it had nothing to do with the weather.
Dominic turned as he entered.
“Salbury,” Adam greeted.
“Huxley.”
He did not bother with small talk. “Come with me.”
Back in the study, he shut the door and went to the sideboard.
“Brandy?” he asked.
Dominic took the proffered glass. “Thank you, but I am afraid I am not here for alcohol.”
“Well, it is rather early.” Adam poured a glass for himself and turned. “Why have you come all this way?”
Dominic said nothing for a beat, which only heightened Adam’s unease.
“Did Emily forget something?” Adam asked.
Dominic shook his head. “I came to invite you to the opera.”
Adam stared at him. “The opera?”
“Yes.”
“You came all this way to invite me to the opera?”
Dominic took a sip. “Why is that so hard to believe?”
Adam gave him a flat look. “Perhaps because you did not send a letter.”
Dominic exhaled. “Well, that would have been less entertaining.”
Adam narrowed his eyes at him. “Opera is not code for something else, is it? I am afraid I do not attend such… things.”
Dominic blinked once, then raised an eyebrow. “And I am the one who does?”
Adam lifted one shoulder. “Well, you are Dominic Bolt. You have a certain… reputation.”
Dominic groaned. “Those days are behind me.”
“Good to know.”
For one second, the corner of Dominic’s mouth curved. Then the humor vanished from his face.
“I came because Emily will be there,” he admitted.
Adam’s grip tightened on the glass.
Dominic went on. “People will see her there. People are already looking too hard at everything. If the annulment is going to be whispered about, you cannot help those whispers by hiding yourself from the public while she is seen alone and wounded.”
Adam looked away.
Dominic stepped closer.“Listen carefully. If you stay away now, the ton will make a feast of it. They will say you have abandoned her, that the marriage is already dead, that whatever happened under your roof was ugly enough to send her back to us half-broken. You may think absence spares everyone discomfort. It does not. It leaves her to carry it in public by herself.”
Adam set his glass down harder than necessary. “You think I should sit in a box and watch people stare at her?”
“I think you should stop making every choice as if your own misery is the only thing in the room.”
Adam felt the weight of those words crash down and silence him.
Dominic either didn’t notice or simply did not want to acknowledge it. His voice remained low when he spoke again.“You need to go, not because you are eager to, but because she should not be the only visible one in this.”
Adam looked at him for a long moment. “You are insufferable.”
Dominic nodded. “So I have been told.”
Three days later, Adam found himself in the opera house, hating every step that had brought him there.
The music pulsed faintly from the orchestra pit while people settled, glanced, and greeted one another with that bored fashion.
Dominic had arranged the box with an intentionality that Adam couldn’t help but think was cruel.
He was close enough to see Emily clearly, but far enough that he could do nothing useful with the sight of her.
She was already seated when he entered, and he saw her all at once.
She was in a pale gold silk gown, tight enough to flatter her without shouting for admiration, which made admiration inevitable.
Then her face. The beauty of it had not changed, but the sadness had.
It was more obvious than anything, even though it seemed to be fading away.
The strain around her mouth made something inside him go hollow.
She turned slightly to answer Sybella, and the movement drew every eye in the neighboring box.
Every fool in the theater had eyes tonight.
Adam remained seated as the performance began. He heard none of it properly. The music rose, and voices carried. A soprano sang of some noble suffering that would have irritated him under any other circumstances. Tonight, it vanished into the greater torment sitting three boxes away.
The men noticed Emily, and for some reason, that fact stripped the last of his composure. One older gentleman kept turning back too often when a wave of applause rose high enough to give him cover, and a younger one, sleek-haired and smug, took longer than necessary to bow when introduced to her.
Adam caught every glance.
He could not stop them. He could not walk over and lay claim to a woman he had driven away from him with his own fear. He could not shout from where he stood for the men to back off. He could not even breathe without feeling how impossible the whole thing had become.
She sat there, beautiful and sad, and still wanted by the room.
That was the true punishment. Loss had not made her dimmer. It had only made him understand how visible she would remain once she slipped fully beyond him, and that thought did something to his jealousy. It stopped feeling like anger and turned into full-blown panic.
If this stood, if the annulment went through, if he kept telling himself she would be safer without him, one day she would be free, and every hand, every gaze, every bow would have the right to approach.
The pressure built so steadily that he did not feel the exact moment it became unbearable.
Dominic glanced at him once during the second act and saw enough.
“Huxley? Perhaps it might do you some good to fix your face,” he murmured.
Adam did not answer.
“You look like a man about to set fire to the place.”
Adam rose, and Dominic caught his sleeve.
“Where are you going?”
Adam swallowed. “Home.”
Dominic let him go at that moment. There was no point in holding him back.
Adam left before anyone else in the box could ask questions. He crossed the corridor, took the stairs too quickly, and stepped out into the London night with the music still ringing faintly behind him like some kind of mockery.
By the time he reached Huxley Manor, he was no calmer than when he had left.
He handed off his gloves without seeing the servant’s face and went straight for his study, knowing before he even reached the door that whatever composure he had been holding onto was about to shatter.
“Your Grace, there is a?—”
“Not now,” he snapped, raising his hand before whoever it was could finish speaking.
The door slammed shut behind him, and that was all it took.
He crossed the room in two strides and swept the nearest stack of papers off the desk with one hard motion. They hit the floor in a wild scatter, and he still felt unsatisfied. His heart pounded with rage at himself, at the world.At his father.
He yanked open the top drawer so roughly it slammed against the stop, found nothing in it that mattered, and shoved it shut again with enough force to rattle the lamp.
A chair went over next. Then the ledger on the side table.
Then the inkstand, which struck the fireplace and burst black across the stone.
“Damn it.” The word came out low and wrecked.
He caught the edge of the desk with both hands and bent over it, breathing hard. The room looked as if someone else had broken into it.
Good . Let it. He was sick of surfaces that looked orderly while everything beneath them rotted.
Emily’s face at the opera would not leave him. All he could see between waves of his blinding rage was her eyes, shadowed with grief, and her mouth, too soft for the strain around it.
He could still see the way other men had noticed her, not knowing she was already half-ruined by the man who had promised to protect her from ruin.
He struck the desk once with the heel of his hand and then again, the second blow harder. Then, something in the stacked correspondence slid free and dropped behind the side cabinet.
Great.
Adam swore and yanked the cabinet outward to reach it.
Old papers had gathered in the narrow gap behind it, folded letters, estate memoranda, receipts long forgotten, a strip of wax-brittled ribbon—all shoved into the wrong cabinet and left there.
He crouched, one knee hitting the floor hard enough to bruise, and seized the little pile in one impatient fist.
Then, he stopped.
One letter had a seal broken long ago and a date written across the back in a hand he recognized at once. His father’s.
The date hit him before the meaning did.
Dear God.
It was the day of the carriage accident.
Adam went very still.
The study immediately narrowed to the paper in his hand. The broken chair, the spilled ink, the scattered papers—all of it fell away under one brutal certainty. He knew that handwriting. He had not seen it in years and yet would have recognized it blind.
For one second, he only stared. Then, after gathering as much composure as he could, he unfolded the letter.
It shook once in his grip before he steadied it enough to read.
My dear Adam,