Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
The door clicked shut behind her parents, leaving a silence that felt too heavy for the small parlor.
Cressida stood near the window, her hands clenched in her skirts, trying to quell the tremor in her limbs.
The confrontation had scraped her raw. Years of suppressed hurt finally voiced, finally acknowledged, even if her parents’ apology had sounded more like capitulation than genuine contrition.
But none of that mattered as much as the man standing near the mantelpiece, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
“Thank you.” The words emerged smaller than she’d intended. “For what you did. For making them—” She swallowed. “Thank you.”
Theodore said nothing for a long moment, his dark eyes studying her with that particular intensity that always made her feel simultaneously exposed and seen. Then he stepped forward, closing the distance between them with slow, deliberate strides.
“I think you should go,” she added quickly, moving toward the door. “I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m sure you have other things to do—”
“No.”
The single syllable stopped her mid-step. She turned back to find him closer now, close enough that she could see the faint shadows beneath his eyes, the slight dishevelment of his cravat, the tension in his jaw that suggested he’d been holding himself together by sheer force of will.
“Theodore, please.” Her voice wavered despite her best efforts. “I can’t do this right now. Whatever you came here to say—”
“I came to tell you the truth.” His hands flexed at his sides. She recognized the gesture. He was fighting his demons right in front of her. “About Charles… and about what happened to my family. About why I’ve spent seventeen years convinced that trusting anyone was the surest path to destruction.”
Cressida’s breath caught. She’d imagined this conversation countless times over the past few days, but now that it was here, she found herself terrified of what she might hear. Terrified of the hurt it might inflict, terrified of how it might change everything between them.
But she owed him this much. After everything, she owed him her attention.
“All right,” she said quietly, sinking into the nearest chair because her legs suddenly felt unreliable. “I’m listening.”
Theodore moved to the window. For a long moment, he simply stood there, his gaze fixed on something beyond the glass that she couldn’t see. When he finally spoke, his voice had a quality she’d never heard before—stripped of its usual careful control, raw in a way that made her chest ache.
“Charles was my uncle. My… my father’s younger brother.
” He paused, his jaw working. “I adored him. He was everything my father wasn’t—warm, charismatic, the sort of man who made you feel like the most important person in the room simply by turning his attention to you.
My father was cold, distant, and consumed by his own bitterness.
But Charles…” His voice roughened. “Charles treated me like I mattered.”
Cressida watched him, saw the way his shoulders tensed as he forced himself to continue.
“I was seventeen when I discovered the affair. Walked into a room I shouldn’t have entered and found him with my mother.
” He turned to face her, and the devastation in his eyes nearly undid her.
“They convinced me to keep silent. Said it would destroy the family if anyone knew, said my father would never forgive me for being the one to tell him. And I believed them because I loved them both, and because I was too young and too stupid to see that they were using my affection as a weapon.”
“Theodore—” She started to rise, but he held up a hand, stopping her.
“My father discovered them, eventually. I don’t know how—perhaps it was a servant, or perhaps his suspicions pushed him.
He challenged Charles to a duel.” His voice had gone flat now, reciting facts as though they belonged to someone else’s history.
“They met at dawn. Both were fatally wounded. My father died in my arms, and his last words to me were a warning never to trust a woman because she would destroy me as my mother had destroyed our family.”
Cressida’s throat constricted, tears stinging her eyes.
“I inherited the title that day. Seventeen years old, watching my father bleed out while my uncle lay dying fifty paces away, knowing that my silence had contributed to their deaths. Knowing that if I’d spoken sooner, been braver, been less selfish, they might both still be alive.
” He drew a breath, and she heard the tremor in it.
“My mother was shunned by society. She retreated to the dower house and died a few years later, though I suspect it was more grief and shame than any physical ailment. And I was left alone, convinced that caring about anyone meant risking the same devastation.”
He moved toward her then, sinking into the chair opposite hers, his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped between them.
The vulnerability of the posture struck her—this man who held himself so carefully, now folded in on himself as though the weight of seventeen years had finally become too much to bear standing.
“I’ve spent all this time building walls,” he continued, his gaze fixed on his hands.
“Convincing myself that isolation was safety, that keeping everyone at a distance meant they couldn’t hurt me.
And then you walked into my life—stubborn, impossible, refusing to accept my coldness as an immutable fact.
You pushed at every boundary I’d constructed, demanded honesty when I’d given you none, offered trust when I’d done nothing to earn it.
” He looked up, and the raw emotion in his eyes made her breath catch.
“And it terrified me. Because wanting you felt like the most dangerous thing I’d ever done. ”
“So you pushed me away,” she said softly, understanding crystallizing. “When I uncovered Charles’s portrait, when I got too close to what you’d hidden—”
“I panicked.” His voice cracked. “I saw you reaching for what I’d kept buried, and all I could think was that letting you see that part of me meant giving you the power to destroy me the way my mother destroyed my father.
The way Charles destroyed our entire family.
I told myself I was protecting us both, but the truth is I was just a coward. ”
Cressida wiped her cheeks, surprised to find them wet. “You’re not a coward.”
“I am.” He leaned forward, his expression intense.
“I’ve been terrified of loving you because I convinced myself that love inevitably leads to betrayal, to manipulation, to the kind of devastation I witnessed at seventeen.
But these past few days without you have shown me something I was too blind to see before: I’ve already destroyed us.
Not through passion or trust or any of the things I was afraid of, but through my own refusal to let you in.
Through my certainty that keeping you at arm’s length was somehow protecting both of us when all it did was ensure we’d both be miserable. ”
The tears came faster now, emotion welling up from a deep place she’d tried to keep locked away since leaving Ashmere. Because this was what she’d wanted—this honesty, this vulnerability, this man finally trusting her enough to show her his wounds instead of hiding them behind aristocratic disdain.
But it also hurt, hearing the pain in his voice, seeing the guilt he’d carried for so long etched into every line of his face.
“You can’t continue punishing yourself for something that happened in the past,” she said, her voice thick with tears.
“What your mother and Charles did—those were their choices, Theodore. Their failures. Not yours. You were seventeen years old, confronted with an impossible situation created by people who should have protected you instead of manipulating you.”
“I should have spoken sooner—”
“And your father might have challenged Charles anyway. You told me he wasn’t a man who tolerated betrayal quietly.
” She leaned forward, holding his gaze. “You cannot know what would have happened if you’d acted differently.
And you have to stop blaming yourself for variables you could never control.
You were a boy. A boy who loved his family and tried to protect them in the only way he knew how.
That doesn’t make you guilty of their deaths. It makes you human.”
Theodore’s eyes closed, his jaw clenching as though he were fighting against years of accumulated certainty. When he opened them again, the devastation there nearly broke her.
“I don’t know how to let go of this,” he admitted, his voice rough. “It’s defined me for so long, I don’t know who I am without it.”
“Then we’ll figure it out together.” She squeezed his hands.
“But you have to let me in, Theodore. Completely. No more walls, no more secrets kept because you’re afraid of what I’ll think or how I’ll use the information against you.
If this marriage is going to work… if we’re going to have any chance at happiness, you have to trust me. ”
“I do trust you.” The words came quickly, desperately. “That’s what terrifies me. I trust you in a way I’ve never trusted anyone, and that makes me feel so exposed.”
“Good.” She surprised herself with the firmness of the word.
“Because I’ve been exposed since the moment I married you.
You’ve seen me at my worst, Theodore. You’ve watched me be petty and jealous and desperate for approval.
You’ve held me while I cried over parents who’ve never truly cared about my happiness.
You know every insecurity I possess, every fear that keeps me awake at night, and you stayed anyway. ”
“Because I love you.”
The words hung in the air between them, simple and devastating. Cressida’s breath stuttered in her chest, tears still spilling.
“What?” The word was barely more than a whisper.