Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
She found him on the terrace.
He had not gone far. Only as far as the stone balustrade at the far edge, where the garden fell away in long terraced steps toward the dark water of the ornamental lake below.
His back was to her, both hands braced against the railing, and from across the flagstones, she could see the tension in the set of his shoulders.
She crossed the terrace slowly, as though approaching a wounded animal, her full attention on him so that she barely even registered the cool night air blowing against her face.
She stopped at his side and did not say anything for a moment.
Then she took a breath and reached out, laying her hand on his arm.
He flinched, but even that was gone before she could have pointed to it. Still, he did not pull away.
“I needed air.” His voice was level.
“I know.” She kept her hand where it was, despite the way her whole body focused on those few inches of contact. “Are you all right?”
“Perfectly.”
She looked out at the dark garden and chose not to press him.
“She loves you,” she said instead. “Your aunt.”
The tendons in his forearm tightened beneath her hand.
“Her love for me is not in question.” He pushed off the railing and turned away from the view, though he didn’t move far.
His profile was sharp against the low light from the castle—the angle of his jaw, the line of his mouth, the slight tension at the corners.
“You must think me a fool,” he said. “To have been manipulated so easily by my own family.”
The bitterness in his voice stopped her. She turned to look at him properly.
“I think nothing of the sort,” she said plainly, because this was not a moment for careful diplomacy. “Being deceived by someone who loves you is not foolishness, Theodore. It says something about them, not about you.”
Theodore obviously did not agree. “It says I was not paying sufficient attention.”
“Or it says that you allowed yourself to trust someone, and she used that trust without asking your permission.” She held his gaze.
“I understand why you’re angry. I am somewhat angry myself, but what your aunt did…
I think it came from a place of genuine care.
No, I’m certain of that.” She paused. “But I do agree that she was wrong to act without consulting either of us.”
Theodore’s eyes snapped to her face, sharp and bright. “You are more charitable than the situation warrants,” he remarked, his tone strung with an emotion that sounded very close to surprised admiration.
Cressida decided not to take issue with that and instead pushed ahead.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I am simply more practiced at forgiving the people who manage me without my consent,” she said with quiet steadiness that held no resentment, only clarity.
“I spent two years having my life arranged by others who were quite certain they knew what was best for me. I spent most of my life that way, truly. The last two years were merely… harsher.” She watched his expression shift.
“It does not make what Lady Seymore did right. But I recognize the shape of it, and I can tell the difference between someone who acts out of calculation and someone who acts out of love.”
Theodore fell quiet. He turned back to the railing but didn’t grip it this time. His hands simply rested there, loose.
“Why are you so convinced,” Cressida asked carefully, “that everyone intends to betray you?”
The question settled into the night air between them.
She had turned the question over all the way through the castle, debating the wisdom of asking it.
But when he had said “manipulated by my own family,” his voice had not been that of a man in the grip of a fresh injury.
There had been something worn into it, the particular flatness of a wound that had long since stopped being acute.
He exhaled through his nose, a low, frustrated sound. “Because I have been betrayed,” he said flatly.
“Oh…”
She did not know the specifics, since he had never revealed them, and she had not asked. What she had was a single sentence, given in the heat of a corridor argument and never returned to:
“I’ve watched passion destroy everything it touches. I swore I’d never become the man who destroyed his family.”
She had held those words carefully ever since, turning them over without forcing them into a shape he had not yet chosen to give her.
“But knowing that betrayal is possible is different from deciding it is inevitable.”
Theodore snorted. “The distinction hasn’t offered much protection in practice.”
“No,” she murmured. “I imagine it hasn’t.”
He was quiet for longer this time. A late owl called somewhere in the trees below the terrace, and the air moved briefly over the flagstones, carrying the smell of the garden.
“Trusting people,” he said eventually, looking toward the dark horizon rather than at her, “feels dangerous to me. Trusting you feels dangerous.”
Cressida reached down and took his hand, because she knew just how much it must have taken him to say those words.
He watched her fingers close around his against the cool stone of the railing, and his expression crumbled into a limbo of emotions stuck between surprise and relief.
“You can trust me,” she said softly. “I know we started out badly. I know the circumstances were not what either of us would have chosen, and I know I am not always easy, and that this arrangement was forced on us by people who had their own ideas about what we needed.” She held his gaze when he finally looked back up at her.
“But I have not deceived you. Not once. And I’d like to make this marriage work.
” She gently squeezed his fingers. “Not because I must, but because I want to.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The quality of his silence had changed—not the practiced blankness she had learned to read as withholding, but something more unsteady, as though he was accounting for something at speed and finding the arithmetic unexpectedly difficult.
“About… about the scandal sheets,” he rasped.
“I was wrong.” His gaze dropped back to their joined hands.
“I accused you repeatedly, and without sufficient evidence, of something you did not do.” He looked up again.
“I owe you an apology. I am truly sorry, Cressida. I should have never even implied, or even considered, you might be involved.”
She had imagined, in various idle moments over the past weeks, what it might feel like to hear him say those words.
She had assumed it would elicit satisfaction, or vindication, or some satisfying resolution of the long, grinding frustration of not being believed.
What it actually elicited was something quieter and more unexpected: a loosening in her chest, as though something she had been bracing against without realizing it had simply been removed.
“Thank you for saying that,” she said.
“You should never thank me for giving you something that is your right, Duchess, especially when I have been such a cad about it.” He said it simply and with naked honesty.
Cressida’s cheeks lifted into a smile she could barely hold back. She squeezed his hand again. “I have not deceived you. I want you to know that it is not going to change.”
“I know.” He said it with a touch of shame. “I know that now.”
He looked at her with that same intense attention and turned toward her incrementally, as though he was uncertain of her reaction. His free hand rose to her face and stopped, hovering close, close enough that she could feel the warmth of it.
He looked at her, and she understood quite clearly what he was not quite doing. So she closed the remaining distance, rose on her tiptoes, and pressed her mouth to his.
The kiss was brief, slightly off-center, and not at all elegant, and she felt him freeze. Heart slamming in her chest from panic, she pulled back an inch and found him staring at her.
“You—” he started, but lost steam, obviously not sure how to voice his pleasant shock.
“You were taking rather a long time,” she said, her cheeks heating.
A breath escaped him, low and involuntary, and the corner of his mouth twitched. Cressida felt her own laugh rise before she could suppress it.
For a moment, they stood on the dark terrace in a state of undignified helplessness that she would, she suspected, remember for the rest of her life.
Then he cupped her face in both hands and kissed her properly, with a thoroughness and a certainty that had nothing tentative in it, that made the previous moment’s hesitation feel like a door being held carefully open.
She gripped his shirt and kissed him back, and the cool night air and the dark garden and the whole accumulated difficulty of the evening receded somewhere behind them.
“Come inside,” he said against her mouth.
The roughness of his voice made her shudder.
“Yes,” she breathed.
He did not put her down.
That was the first thing—the simple, surprising fact of it.
He pulled back from the kiss, looked at her for one decisive second, then wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off the flagstones with the unceremonious efficiency of a man who had made a decision and saw no reason to delay its execution.
She made an undignified sound. “What are you—”
“I’m taking you inside,” he said.
He carried her through the terrace doors, across the threshold, and into the corridor. There, Cressida became acutely, mortifyingly aware that it was not yet late enough for the servants to have retired.
Thomas the footman, posted at the end of the corridor, turned at the sound of their entrance and went through approximately four distinct expressions in the space of a second before settling with admirable professionalism on a point somewhere above their heads.
“Good evening, Your Grace,” he said to the ceiling.
Theodore did not slow down. “Thomas,” he said, by way of acknowledgment, and rounded the corner into the main staircase.
Cressida pressed her face against his shoulder. She could feel the laugh building in her chest.
“He saw us,” she said, her voice muffled.
“Yes.”
“And you do not care.”
“No.”
That much was true, if the sheer flatness of his reply was anything to go by.
She felt the first stair, the second—he was carrying her at a pace that suggested he found the entire staircase a personal inconvenience—and from below, she heard the unmistakable sound of the kitchen door opening and at least two sets of footsteps coming to an abrupt halt. She could literally feel the pause.
Then, in a low, delighted whisper she was almost certain she was not meant to hear: “I told you.”
That was Mrs. Agnes, her tone triumphant.
That was the end of her composure. The laugh escaped against Theodore’s neck, helpless and completely un-duchesslike, and she felt the answering rumble in his chest.
“Your entire household is watching.”