Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
“Are you mad?” Elinor had him by the sleeve before he could speak.
She pulled him into the shadow of the garden wall, her eyes cutting upward to the darkened windows of Morland House. Her hair hung loose over one shoulder, and her cloak was fastened crookedly, as though she had dressed in the dark, which she had.
“You could ruin me,” she hissed. “If anyone sees you here, if my stepmother looks out of her window—”
“No one saw me. I was careful.”
“You were throwing pebbles at my window.”
“Small ones.”
Her mouth pressed into a line that was trying not to be amused.
Lucien knew he did not deserve even that much, not after the week he had given her, but the sight of her standing in the garden in her nightclothes and her crooked cloak and her spectacles catching the moonlight made his chest ache with a precision he had no defense against.
“Come with me,” he said. “Please.”
“It is too risky.”
“You sneak out of this house on a regular basis to teach orphans in a former workhouse. You have done it for months. This is no different.”
She held his gaze, her jaw set, and then she glanced up at her window once more. Whatever she saw, or did not see, decided for her. She sighed and followed him around the side of the house to where his carriage waited in a lane that the street lamps did not reach.
He handed her up and climbed in after her. The carriage moved before either of them spoke, the driver already instructed.
“Where are we?”
The apartment was above a tailor’s shop on a quiet street south of Mayfair.
Two rooms, simply furnished: a sitting room with a fireplace and a desk, a small bedroom beyond.
No portraits, no family crests, nothing that announced the man who owned it.
It could have belonged to anyone, and Elinor suspected that was the point.
“I come here when I need privacy from the duchy,” Lucien told her. He moved through the space with the ease of long familiarity, lighting a second lamp, stoking the fire. “From Fairmont House, from the ton, from being His Grace. This is where I am Lucien and nothing more.”
Elinor looked at the bare walls. The single shelf of books.
The absence of anything that resembled the wealth he wore in public.
She had expected something gilded. Something performative.
This was the opposite. This room was honest, and the honesty of it unsettled her more than any luxury could have.
“Why did you come to my house tonight?” she asked. “Were you going to keep throwing pebbles until I woke?”
Lucien paused. “You were already awake.”
Her chin lifted. “How could you possibly know that?”
“You came to the window too quickly. If I had woken you, you would have been disoriented.” He set two glasses on the desk and poured brandy into each. “You were lying in bed, thinking, and the pebbles gave you a reason to stop.”
She did not like how well he read her. She did not like the way her pulse quickened at the proof of his attention, the evidence that he had been watching her closely enough to know the difference between sleep and restlessness.
He handed her a glass. Their fingers brushed, and neither of them pulled away.
Elinor sat in the chair by the fire. Lucien sat across from her. The fire crackled between them.
“What happened at the garden party was a lapse in judgment,” he said. His voice had gone careful, measured, the tone he used when he was constructing walls in real time. “I should not have touched you.”
The words hit her like cold water. She had spent a week replaying that alcove in her mind, and he was calling it a lapse.
“Then don’t do it again.” She kept her voice level. “If I mean nothing to you, Lucien, then do not do it again.”
His shoulders dropped. He looked at the fire instead of at her, and the avoidance told her more than his words had.
“Do you truly believe you mean nothing to me?”
“You vanished for a week.” The composure she had assembled in the carriage cracked. “You did not write. You did not visit Lyra House. The children asked where you were, and I had no answer, because I did not have one for myself.”
He put his head in his hands.
“Who would want a wallflower with spectacles and an interest in astronomy?” Her voice rose, filling the small room.
“You have the attention of every woman in London. You could walk into any ballroom and leave with anyone. Why on earth would you want me, and why would you run from me after what happened in that alcove?”
Lucien lifted his head. His eyes were raw, stripped of charm, stripped of performance, and the nakedness of his expression stopped her.
“Because I want you,” he said. “Desperately. All to myself. And that is the problem, Elinor, because I am not good for you. I am a corrupted man. I have spent half my life bedding women I felt nothing for, wearing a mask so convincing that most days I cannot find my own face beneath it. My uncle raised me after my father died. He was a cruel man, and I have spent eleven years wondering how much of him I carry.”
The confession landed between them like something dropped from a height. Elinor set her glass on the table and leaned forward.
“That is not an answer. That is a shield.”
His jaw tightened. “It is the truth.”
“It is part of the truth. The part you use to keep people at a distance.” She held his gaze. “What happened to you, Lucien? Not the version you perform for the ton. The real one.”
“Elinor.”
“You brought me here because this is the place where you are honest. So be honest.”
He looked at the fire. His hands hung between his knees, and she watched the struggle move through his body, the way his fingers curled and released, the way his breath caught before he spoke.
“There was a woman,” he said. “When I was twenty-one. Her name was Lady Vivian Clarke.”
Elinor waited. She did not prompt. She sat in the chair with her hands folded and let the silence do the work, because she could see that he was fighting himself, and she would not make it easier or harder. She would only stay.
“We grew up near each other. I thought she saw me. Not the title, not the inheritance, just me.” He paused. “I was engaged to her. Formally. My uncle had approved the match.”
“What happened?”
“She left.” The words came out flat. “With my closest friend. Henry Merritt. I had lent him three hundred pounds because his family had nothing, and he used it to book two passages to America. They sailed before I knew they were gone. Vivian left a letter.”
Elinor’s chest ached. She could see the twenty-one-year-old boy beneath the duke’s armor, the one who had trusted two people completely and lost them both in the same morning.
“What did the letter say?” she asked.
“That she was sorry. That she had loved Henry all along. That she hoped I would understand.” His mouth twisted. “I did not understand. I do not think I have understood anything properly since.”
“And so, you decided you were corrupted.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Two people betrayed you, and you decided the flaw was yours. That you drove them away, rather than accepting that they were simply cruel.” She leaned forward. “You are not corrupted, Lucien. You are wounded. There is a difference.”
His breath left him as though she had struck him. He stared at her, and his expression was one she had never seen before: the look of a man hearing something he had needed to hear for eleven years and had never allowed anyone close enough to say.
“I can take you home,” he said. His voice was rough. “If that is what you want.”
“No.” The word left her mouth before she could weigh it. “I don’t want to go home.”
He went still. “Elinor.”
“What do you want?” he asked.
Her heart hammered. She could feel the heat of the fire on one side of her face and the cool of the room on the other, and between the two, a choice that would change the shape of everything.
“I want you to kiss me,” she said.
Lucien did not move. “You do not know what you are asking.”
“I know exactly what I am asking.”
“I am a rake, Elinor. That is not a reputation. That is a fact. I cannot offer you what a husband would offer. I cannot promise you anything beyond this room, this night, and you deserve—”
“Stop telling me what I deserve.” Her voice came out steady, though her hands trembled in her lap.
“The engagement will end. I know that. Afterward, I will find a reasonable match, some kind lord who will give me a respectable life and a quiet house and absolutely none of what I felt in that alcove.”
His eyes darkened.
“I may never feel that again,” she continued. “With anyone. You have the experience to know what passion is, and I have spent twenty years not knowing. I am asking for one night. One night to understand what it feels like before I spend the rest of my life without it.”
The silence that followed was so complete that she could hear the fire popping.
Lucien rose from his chair. He crossed the distance between them in two strides, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her.
The kiss was nothing like the alcove. The alcove had been stolen, urgent, driven by a need that neither of them had been prepared for.
This was deliberate. His mouth moved against hers with an intention that made her breath stop, and when his tongue touched her lower lip, she opened for him without hesitation.
Her hands found his waistcoat. She gripped the fabric and pulled him closer, and he came, one knee pressing into the chair beside her hip, his body angling over hers.
His fingers threaded through her hair, loosening the pins, and the strands fell around her shoulders in a way that made her feel undone before he had removed a single piece of clothing.
He broke the kiss and looked at her. His breathing was uneven, his pupils blown dark, and the careful composure of the Duke of Fairmont was nowhere.
“You are trusting me,” he murmured, his thumbs tracing the line of her jaw. “That is enough. That is everything.”