Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"Iwill be going to London for a while," Theodore said. "Business that requires my attention in person."
Emily looked at him across the table. She should have known, when he asked to have breakfast together that morning, that he was going to drop something on her.
She sat stiffly, the silver spoon in her hand feeling unnaturally heavy as the clinking of china filled the gaps in their conversation.
She wasn't a child; she knew exactly what this was.
This was a retreat. He was putting distance between them because the air in the house had become too thick with things they had left unsaid.
Deep down, a cold knot of guilt tightened in her stomach. She was certain it was because of her, because she had dared to touch him.
“Business, you say?” she asked, her voice tilting upward in a sharp, challenging edge. “What specific business requires the Duke of Carrowell to vanish so abruptly?”
Theodore hesitated, his gaze fixed on his plate for a fraction of a second too long before he looked up with a mask of perfect, infuriating calm. “A matter regarding the shipping lanes and a meeting at the club. It cannot be delayed.”
“How long is a while?” she asked, trying to meet his eyes.
"Two weeks," he said. "Perhaps a little longer."
She nodded. Then she added. "The shipping lanes?"
He looked at her. "Yes."
"Which ones specifically?"
"The eastern routes,” he answered almost too quickly. “There have been disputes about the tariff arrangements."
"I see," she said. "Surely your solicitors could handle the bulk of the paperwork? Or is the London air suddenly more conducive to business than the study you’ve spent every waking hour in for weeks now?"
She was poking at the edges of his story, desperate to find a seam she could pull until the whole facade unraveled. She wanted him to admit he was fleeing. She wanted him to say he was uncomfortable, or angry, or even confused, anything other than the chilling indifference.
Emily watched him, her heart doing a strange, frantic dance in her chest. Something had shifted in the tectonic plates of their arrangement.
The sharp, annoying friction that had defined their early days, the constant, sparking battle of wits she had grown to rely on had melted into a heavy, suffocating heat.
She tried to tell herself that the ache she felt watching him prepare to leave was merely a sense of debt.
He had saved Frederick; he had given her a sanctuary.
Naturally, she was simply concerned for the stability of her benefactor.
"Is it truly the business?" she pressed, her voice softening, losing its defensive edge. "Or is it that you find the company here... changed?"
She wanted him to admit that he felt it too... the terrifying gravity pulling them toward a center they hadn't agreed upon. She wanted him to say that the library had changed everything.
"The company is as it has always been," he replied, though the slight tremor in his hand as he set down his cup betrayed him.
Emily looked away, the guilt redoubling.
She had let her guard down, and in doing so, she had made the air between them impossible to breathe.
She was indebted to him for her life, her name, and her nephew's future, and yet she had repaid him by making his own home a place he felt the need to flee.
If she wasn't careful, the understanding they had built would be nothing more than a ghost, and she would be left haunting the halls of a house that felt far too large without his presence to fill it.
“Theodore,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “Do you think... perhaps we need to talk?”
Theodore didn't even look up from his coffee. He adjusted the set of his cuffs slowly and let out a soft sigh. “About what specifically?”
“About —” She stopped, the word catching in the back of her throat like a physical obstacle.
She tried again, her voice smaller this time.
“About things. Between us. About whether things are —” She pressed her lips together, searching for a word that didn't sound like an accusation. “About whether things are all right.”
“Things are all right,” he said, his tone flat and unyielding.
“Are they?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him, truly looked at him. “You do not seem like someone for whom things are all right.”
“I seem perfectly fine,” he said, his voice dropping. “I have business in London,” he repeated, his gaze fixed on a point just past her shoulder.
“You have business here too,” she said, her hands clenching at her sides. “You have an estate and a ward that really likes you and a —” She stopped, the word wife hovering in the air between them.
“A what?” he asked, his eyes finally snapping to hers, challenging her to finish the sentence.
She met his gaze, her breath hitching. “A household,” she said, retreating to the safer, colder word. “You have a household.”
She felt something rise in her then, a sudden, hot tide that was not quite frustration and not quite distress, but a volatile mixture of both, stirred together with a sharp longing. “Theodore,” she said, almost in a whisper. “What is the matter with you?”
“Nothing is the matter with me.”
“Something is the matter with you.”
“Emily —”
“You have been strange for days now,” she said, the words spilling out now, no longer contained by her pride. “You have been perfectly pleasant and perfectly present and completely unreachable, and I do not know what I am supposed to do with that.”
She was keeping her voice level. She was doing an admirable job of keeping her voice level, even as the room seemed to shrink around them.
“You said we would talk. You said that on the stairs, and you said it in the garden, and you have been saying it and then finding reasons not to —”
She stopped abruptly. The echo of her own voice felt too loud, too desperate in the quiet of the morning room. A sudden, cold wave of self-consciousness washed over her, and she retreated mentally, pulling her thoughts back behind the barricades she had spent years building.
He was saying too much. She was acting like a woman who had a claim on his time, his thoughts, and his presence, when their contract had promised nothing of the sort.
The fear that she was becoming a burden—or worse, a woman asking for more than he was willing to give—tightened her throat. She didn't want to be the reason he felt suffocated in his own home. If he was going to London to find air, she wouldn't be the one to snatch it from him.
She smoothed the front of her gown, her expression shifting from heated frustration to a brittle, polite mask.
"I apologize," she said, her voice now dangerously calm. "I am overstepping. It is your house and your schedule, and if you say you have business, then you have business. I wish you the best of luck with your meetings and your... shipping dispute."
She stood to her feet, intending to leave the room before she lost her nerve.
She could feel the prickle of tears behind her eyes, but she refused to let them fall.
Her chair scraped softly against the floor as she moved, but before she could get any further, Theodore stepped out, cutting off her path and stopping her in her tracks.
The silence between them was jagged and heavy. Emily kept her eyes fixed on the silver buttons of his coat, refusing to look up, until his voice broke the quiet.
"Emily," he whispered.
She finally lifted her gaze, and her breath hitched. Theodore’s eyes searched hers with a raw, turbulent intensity that made her heart hammer against her ribs.
"Do you hate me?" Theodore asked.
The question was so small, so stripped of his usual armor, that it seemed to vibrate in the air between them. Emily looked at him in genuine shock.
"Do you want me to?" she asked back, her voice barely a breath.
Theodore didn't flinch. He stepped closer, looming over her until she was forced to tilt her head back. She didn't wait for him to make another move. She stepped around him, her skirts whispering against his boots.
She walked into the corridor, and she did not look back.
She told herself it was for the best. Distance was the only sensible, practical thing left for two people whose arrangement had suddenly developed a pulse.
They had moved into territory neither had planned for, and time away in London would provide the necessary oxygen.
It would give them room to breathe and room to think.
By the time the carriage wheels rattled back up the drive, things would be clearer.
The edges would be blunted, the fever would have broken, and they would both remember exactly where the lines were drawn.
She told herself all of that.
She believed approximately none of it.