Chapter 14 #2
Emily jerked back instinctively, taking a sharp step away and lowering her head. Her heart was a frantic drum in her ears. She had spent weeks convincing herself that he would want to live his life exactly as he had before, free, detached, and utterly unencumbered by the weight of a domestic life.
“Emily,” Theodore whispered.
She shook her head once.
“Look at me.”
She did not look at him. She was looking at the floorboards and thinking about Frederick asleep on the other side of the door.
Then she heard Theodore move.
He stepped closer. Close enough that she could see his feet on the floorboards beside hers. Close enough that when she breathed, she could smell the cedar of him.
“I did not want to get married,” he said. “That is true. That was my reputation, and it was an accurate one.” Theodore reached out, his touch so light it was almost a question. He curled two fingers beneath her chin, his fingers warm and slightly rough. Very slowly, he tilted her head upward.
Emily’s breath hitched as she was forced to follow the movement.
A sharp, liquid tingle raced down her spine, making her knees weak.
As her face was lifted, the world narrowed until there was nothing left but the steady, unwavering heat in his eyes.
For all her efforts to keep him at a distance, he had already claimed the space between them.
“But do not for a single second think that you forced me into anything. If you remember correctly, it was I who got us caught in that library. I, who made the announcement in front of witnesses. I who went to your father.” He tilted his head slightly.
“If anyone was put into a corner that night, Emily, it was you. Not me.”
She shut her eyes briefly, then opened them again.
“I am a stubborn man,” he continued. “Everyone who has ever met me for more than ten minutes knows this. There is not a person alive who has ever made me do something I did not want to do.” He paused. “I made a decision. I stand by my decisions. That is who I am.”
She felt her own breath, shallow and slightly too fast, and hoped very much that he could not tell.
“I thought,” she said, and her voice came out quieter than she intended.
“I thought that you would want things to remain as they were. Before.” She held his gaze because he had put it there, and she had no choice.
“That you would want your freedom. Your life, the way it was. That perhaps this arrangement would simply be a formality, and you would carry on as you always had. I would manage the household and Frederick... we would simply exist alongside each other without any of it meaning —” She stopped.
His fingers were still under her chin.
“I thought,” she said again, more quietly. “That was what you wanted.”
Theodore looked at her for a moment. “Is that what you think of me?” he asked, almost in a whisper.
It was not quite a question. It was the kind of thing a person said when they were deciding whether to be offended or simply honest about it, and she could see him making that decision in real time.
“I did not mean it as an insult,” she said carefully. “I meant it as —”
“I know what you meant it as.” He was quiet for a moment.
“I have never done anything badly in my life. I am many things, Emily. Reckless, occasionally. Irritating, frequently. Ask anyone, and they will confirm both.” The fingers under her chin moved, just slightly, and she felt it.
“But I do not do things halfway. I never have. If I am going to be a husband, then I am going to be one. If Frederick is going to be in my house, then he is going to be in my house. Not at a distance. Not as a formality.” He held her gaze. “I will do my responsibilities.”
Emily swallowed hard, the warmth of his fingers still humming against her skin.
“And those responsibilities,” she began, her voice gaining a thin layer of courage.
“How far do they extend, Your Grace? What is it you truly expect from me in this arrangement?” She swallowed again.
“Because there is quite a lot contained in that word, and we have not discussed any of it. What you expect from me. What I should expect from you. Whether…” She stopped.
Started again. “…Whether you expect this marriage to be a full one.”
While she had been consumed with securing Frederick’s safety and carving out a strong foundation for them to exist, she had neglected the looming shadow of the ducal line, the necessity of an heir.
Society would expect an heir. That was simply the reality of it: the unspoken expectation that sat beneath every title, every marriage contract, and every congratulatory smile from every person who had wished them well at the wedding.
She was the Duchess of Carrowell now, and the Duke of Carrowell would be expected to produce a successor, and by extension, she would be expected to provide one. She had not thought about it. She was thinking about it now, and she could not unthink it.
He had also told her, plainly and directly, that this would never be a love match.
That he had not been looking for a wife and that even if he had, it would have nothing to do with love.
She was not surprised by that. She had not come to this marriage expecting love from a man like Theodore Merrick, who had never been part of the arrangement, but it did make her wonder whether a man who had closed the door on love was also a man who had closed the door on everything that came with it.
She did not need him to love her. She was not asking for that.
She simply wanted clarity. She wanted the lines drawn where she could see them.
Theodore’s expression shifted, the intensity in his gaze cooling. He let his hand drop from her face, the loss of his touch leaving her skin feeling suddenly, sharply cold.
“I expect,” he said slowly. “… that we will find our footing. That we will be respectful of each other. That we will manage this household and care for Frederick and the staff. That we conduct ourselves in a manner that serves us both.” He paused.
“I do not expect anything from you, Emily. You do not owe me anything.”
Emily took a steadying breath, pulling her dignity around her like a cloak. “I see.”
She felt a sudden, sharp need to be away from him, the weight of the morning becoming far too much to bear. “If you will excuse me, Your Grace. I find I am a little overwhelmed in this moment. I must check on the kitchen's progress for Frederick’s breakfast.”
She didn't wait for his response. She turned and walked down the long corridor, her footsteps silent, leaving him standing alone in the gray light of the dawn.
“Are you perhaps upset with me?”
Emily looked up from the rose she had been examining with considerably more attention than it required. Theodore was standing at the garden gate with his coat off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
The gardens at Carrowell had become Emily’s sanctuary, a place where the air felt less heavy than it did within the silent, vaulted corridors of the house.
Frederick was finally on the mend, his fever a memory thanks to the physician Theodore had summoned.
Emily knew she should be grateful, but the words felt like ash in her mouth.
She looked back at the rose. “No, Your Grace.”
“You have taken a liking to the rose garden,” he said.
“I like this garden.”
“You have also,” he said, coming through the gate. “Declined to take tea in the house two times since Tuesday and sent your apologies for dinner twice.”
“I have been busy.”
“In the garden?”
“Gardens require attention,” Emily said. “Mr. Briggs told me so at some length.”
Theodore came to stand beside her. Not too close. The careful, considered distance he had been maintaining since the corridor outside Frederick's room, which she had noticed and told herself she had not noticed.
“I am trying to mend things,” he said calmly. “To apologize for the dinners I missed. Don’t tell me this is retaliation.”
She looked at the rose.
She had been telling herself a great many things lately that were not entirely true.
She had been telling herself, for instance, that she was not bothered by any of it.
By the honeymoon that had not felt like one.
By the days that passed with Theodore somewhere in the house and her somewhere else in it, two people orbiting the same space without quite occupying it together.
She had gotten what she came to this marriage for.
Frederick was safe. The physician Theodore had sent for was considerably better than the village doctor, and Frederick was well again, surprisingly running through the corridors with the maid and laughing.
Something he did not do a lot of back in her father’s house.
She could not complain.
She was not complaining.
She was standing in a rose garden at eleven in the morning because she could not sit still. She could not concentrate, and she had a maddening, persistent curiosity about the man she had married with no reasonable outlet that was making her thoroughly unsettled.
She had heard about his mother. She had heard it from Peggy, and she had been turning it over ever since, quietly and without telling anyone she was doing it.
A boy in a cold house. A father who made perfection the price of approval.
A mother who left. She wanted to know what that had been like.
She wanted to know what he had been like at ten years old and at fifteen and at twenty, and what had made him decide to be the loudest person in every room he walked into when warmth was apparently the last thing his childhood had offered him.
She wanted to know him, and the thought was maddening.
That was the plain, inconvenient truth of it. She was curious about Theodore Merrick in a way she had never been about anyone in her life, and he was right there, in this house, every day, and she had no idea how to say any of that without it causing problems.