Chapter 16
“Miss Watton.”
Madeline’s fingers tightened around the edge of the page before she could stop them, and when she looked up from the book, she found the Duke standing just inside the library, tall in the lamplight, coat still on, gloves in hand, his shadow stretching across the Persian rug.
“Your Grace,” she mumbled, closing the book with care that felt entirely too staged, as if a gentle gesture might disguise the sudden quickness of her pulse. “I did not realize you were still awake.”
“I am,” Wilhelm replied, and his voice was low enough to make the silence around them feel thicker and more intimate. He took a few steps forward and stopped near the nearest armchair. His gaze moved from her face to the book in her lap, then back again. “Has Tessa gone to bed?”
“Tessa is asleep, Your Grace.” She shifted in her seat, smoothing her skirt over her knees, and forced her thoughts back into the lane of propriety.
His brows lifted, and he moved closer, drawing up to the armchair opposite her, though he did not sit. “I want to understand your routine,” he said. “What you intend to teach her, how you intend to structure it.”
Madeline’s chest warmed at the bluntness of it. “I intend to teach her…” she said carefully, choosing each word carefully. “…as a person.”
Wilhelm’s gaze sharpened. “Explain.”
She drew a breath. “It begins in the morning. She usually has an hour of reading, an hour of writing, and lessons in arithmetic as needed. Her French is passable, but I want to strengthen it. Her music is…” Madeline paused, smiling to soften the criticism. “Enthusiastic.”
A beat of silence, then his mouth shifted.
He presented not a smile, but something close enough to make Madeline’s stomach drop unexpectedly.
He lowered himself into the armchair at last, crossing one booted ankle over the other, and the movement made his coat pull slightly across his chest, revealing the strength beneath with an ease that felt almost indecent to notice.
She told herself to look at his face, not at the way his broad hands rested on the armrests, not at the veins at his wrist where his glove had been removed.
“And the rest of the day?” he said, dragging her attention back by sheer force of presence.
“The rest of the day will not be entirely academic,” she replied, making her tone firmer before he could dismiss her. “I will teach her etiquette, of course, but I will not spend hours forcing her to sit with her hands folded. She needs movement, laughter.”
Something moved in his expression so subtly she might have missed it if she had not become so aware of him. His shoulders eased by a fraction. “You handle her easily.”
Madeline blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You do,” he said, and now there was no softness in it, only truth. “She listens to you. She laughs with you. She follows you.” His gaze held hers with a bluntness that made heat crawl up her throat. “None of the others managed that.”
Madeline’s face warmed, and she hated herself for it. “Tessa is not difficult,” she said too quickly.
Wilhelm’s eyes narrowed and for a long moment, he said nothing.
Madeline felt an absurd, aching urge to reach out and smooth the line between his brows, to tell him he could set his burden down for a moment and it would not make him weak, but the thought was so intimate it startled her into stillness.
“Why?” he asked at last. “Why does it come so naturally to you?”
She forced a small breath and gave him a partial truth, because it was the only kind she could afford. “My father used to bring me to the kitchens,” she said, and the words came out before she had time to consider the danger in them. “He said they were the heart of the house.”
Wilhelm’s gaze shifted, focusing more sharply, as if he had just been handed a thread and intended to pull it. “Your father brought you to the kitchens,” he repeated. “Not your mother.”
“No,” Madeline said, and the memory rose so vividly it made her chest ache. Her father had laughed when she tried to lift a heavy pot. He had leaned down and whispered that she did not need to prove her strength to anyone, because he already knew it.
“Was your father… a gentleman?” Wilhelm asked carefully, as though he knew he was stepping near something delicate.
Madeline’s mouth went dry. She had spoken too freely, and she knew it, because she could feel the questions coming. She let her gaze drop briefly to her lap, gathering herself.
“He was a merchant,” she said, and watched Wilhelm’s face as she spoke, searching for the flicker of disdain she had learned to expect from titled men whenever trade was mentioned, but his expression remained controlled. “A successful one. We had… a comfortable life, while he lived.”
“And then he passed,” Wilhelm said, not as a question, but as recognition.
Madeline’s throat tightened. “Yes.”
He leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on his knees, and the movement brought him closer in a way that made Madeline’s pulse jump. His closeness always did that, as if her body had decided he was dangerous.
“How old were you?” he asked.
Madeline’s fingers curled into her skirt. “Fifteen.”
Wilhelm’s gaze held hers, and something shifted in his eyes, a quiet understanding that unsettled her more than pity ever could. “That is young.”
“It was,” she said, and tried to smile, but it did not quite form. “And it was… sudden.”
His jaw flexed, and Madeline could see, in the small flex of muscle near his temple, that he was thinking of Tessa. He was imagining his own child at fifteen with no one to raise her and the thought seemed to scrape something raw inside him.
“And your mother?” he asked after a beat.
Madeline’s stomach tightened, but she forced herself to remain composed. “We did not… get on well,” she answered vaguely on purpose.
Wilhelm studied her, and she could feel his gaze moving over her face as if he could see the fracture beneath the polite words. “I gathered as such after you told me that she taught you not to eat in front of men.”
Madeline’s breath caught so sharply she almost coughed. For a heartbeat, she could not speak at all. She could only hear her mother’s voice, sharp as a needle.
Do not chew like that. Do not take another bite.
Madeline swallowed, her throat too raw. She nodded once.
Wilhelm’s expression hardened. “I should not have said it,” he murmured, and there was something strangely careful in his tone now, as though he realized he had put his finger on a bruise and was deciding whether to withdraw or to stay.
Madeline forced her gaze to remain calm, though she could feel heat rising behind her eyes, the humiliating kind that threatened tears.
Wilhelm’s voice lowered. “I am sorry.”
Madeline blinked. “Your Grace…”
“No one deserves that,” he said, cutting her off with quiet finality. His hands gripped his knees. “No child deserves to be taught that her appetite is shameful.”
Madeline’s mouth opened, then closed again, because she did not know how to respond to a kindness that did not ask for anything in return.
Her father had given her that kindness, but her father was gone, and she had spent so long learning to expect harshness that gentleness felt like an unfamiliar language.
She managed a small nod. “It is… in the past.”
Wilhelm’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Is it?”
Madeline’s fingers clenched under the fold of her skirt because he was too perceptive, looking at her as though he could see the way she still counted bites in her head.
She forced her voice to remain calm. “It does not matter.”
“It does,” Wilhelm said, and the firmness of it made her stomach dip. “It matters because you are in my house. And you will not be made to feel small.”
Her breath caught. She should have thanked him, should have said something polite, but her tongue felt clumsy, and her chest too full.
Wilhelm leaned back slightly, exhaling as though he had realized he was pushing too close to the edge of something. His gaze drifted to the fire for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter, rougher.
“That,” he said, “is why I have avoided remarrying.”
Madeline stilled. “Your Grace?”
“I need a mother for my daughter,” he continued, and he said it with a bluntness that felt almost painfully honest. “Not a title-hungry woman who will tolerate Tessa as a chore or treat her as something broken.”
Madeline’s heart beat faster because she could hear the fear of trusting and being punished for it beneath his control.
“And because,” Wilhelm added, his gaze returning to her, “my own mother was not… kind.”
He hesitated, only briefly, as though weighing whether the truth was worth the disturbance it would cause. Then he exhaled.
“My mother,” he said, “was cold. Precise. Affection was something to be earned, and rarely.” His jaw flexed, though his voice remained even. “Even as a child, I never expected warmth. I swore I would never become her.”
Madeline did not interrupt. She could hear, now, that this was not an explanation offered lightly or frequently.
“When Leah came to me,” he said, and his tone shifted, softened by memory rather than grief, “she was already my friend. She needed protection, a name that would keep the world at bay.”
He glanced away, just long enough to gather himself. “I married her to help her. Not because I wanted a wife. Certainly not because I wanted children.”
Madeline’s stomach dropped.
“I had no intention of building a family,” Wilhelm said plainly. “I believed myself unsuited to it. I believed that wanting nothing was safer than risking becoming someone cruel without meaning to.”
His gaze returned to her then. “Tessa was never planned. But once she existed, she became my reason for existing in a way nothing else ever had.”
The fire popped softly. Wilhelm did not move, and neither did she.
“I will not give her a mother who rules her the way I was ruled,” he said at last. “That is the only certainty I have.”