Chapter 34
“You have been here three days,” Lavinia said. “And you have smiled exactly twice. Both times at the cat.”
Frances looked up from the book she had not been reading. Her sister stood in the doorway of the drawing room at Evermere, arms crossed, her dark hair pinned with the severe precision that indicated she had been thinking about something for a long time and had finally decided to say it.
“I smile at other things,” Frances said.
“Name one.”
Frances opened her mouth then closed it.
Lavinia moved across the room and took a seat beside her on the settee.
She sat close, reminiscent of when Frances was nine and had fallen from a horse, choosing not to cry because their father was watching.
It also recalled the moment after their father’s death when creditors arrived, marking the end of their familiar world.
“Frances.” Lavinia’s hand covered hers. “Why are you here? Truly.”
The question was straightforward, but the answer was complicated. Frances glanced at her sister’s hand and sensed the thing she had kept steady for days starting to break apart.
“I cannot...” Her voice broke. She pressed her lips together. Tried again. “I thought I could manage it. I thought if I was careful enough, if I did not hope too much—”
“Hope for what?”
“For him.” The word came out ragged. “For Alexander. For any of it to be real.”
Lavinia remained silent, waiting. She gently rubbed her thumb in circles on Frances’s hand while Frances focused on the carpet, allowing her words to surface.
“The proposal was... You know how it was. Practical. Sensible. A solution to a problem.” She swallowed. “Not a declaration. I told myself I understood that. I told myself I would not expect more.”
“But you did.”
“Not at first.” Frances pulled her hand free. Pressed both palms against her knees. “At first, it was exactly what he promised. Polite breakfasts. Separate lives under one roof. He was courteous. Correct. And I thought this was fine.”
“What changed?”
“Emily.” The name came with an ache so deep it startled her.
“His ward. She is eight years old, and she lost both her parents. She was so quiet. So careful. And he did not know how to reach her, and I did, and suddenly we were reading together every evening, and she was laughing again, and Alexander watched us with this expression…”
She stopped. The memory pressed against her chest.
“He looked at me as though I had done something miraculous. As though I had given him something he did not know how to ask for.”
Lavinia was very still beside her.
“And then there was the library.” Frances’s voice dropped. “He caught me when I stumbled, and he… he kissed me, Lavinia. He kissed me as though the world were ending, and then he said goodnight and left.”
“He left?”
“He left. And the next morning, he was gone before breakfast. And I thought…” Her throat tightened. “I thought perhaps he needed time. I thought perhaps he was frightened of what he felt because he is frightened of feeling anything at all, and I could wait. I could be patient.”
“Frances—”
“He asked me to stay in Scotland.” The words tumbled now, faster, less controlled.
“After Eleanor’s wedding. He asked if we might travel together.
A week in the Highlands. Just the two of us.
And I said yes because I am a fool, Lavinia.
I am an utter fool who said yes because I wanted it so badly I could not. ..”
Her voice cracked. She pressed a hand to her mouth.
“What happened?” Lavinia asked.
“I heard him.” Frances dropped her hand.
Her eyes burned. “The next morning. I came downstairs, and he was talking to Eleanor in the kitchen, and she asked if he was happy. She asked what we were to each other.” She drew a breath that shook.
“And he said we would return to London and resume our separate lives as planned. That the arrangement was clear from the beginning.”
The tears came. She did not fight them. They spilled down her cheeks, and she pressed her palms against her face and wept the way she had not allowed herself to weep in Scotland.
Not in the carriage. Not at the inns. Not through four days of silence and separate rooms and the careful, excruciating performance of a woman who was not falling apart.
Lavinia wrapped her arms around her, pulling her close. Frances buried her face in her sister’s shoulder, crying with the raw, intense pain of a heart silently shattered by a man unaware of the damage he caused.
“I am his obligation,” Frances said, muffled against Lavinia’s sleeve. “That is all I have ever been. A problem he solved. A duty he fulfilled.”
“You do not know that.”
“I heard him say it.”
“You heard him say the arrangement was clear.” Lavinia’s hand moved through Frances’ hair. “That is not the same as hearing him say he does not love you.”
Frances pulled back. Her face was wet. “He does not.”
“Some men are slower than others to understand their own hearts. Some men build such walls around themselves that they cannot see what is inside until the walls come down.” She wiped a tear from Frances’s cheek with her thumb.
“And some men say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time because they are terrified of saying the right thing to the person who matters most.”
“You are being generous.”
“I am being honest.” Lavinia held her face between both hands. “I married a man who took six months to tell me he loved me. Six months, Frances. During which time he managed to say it to his horse, his butler, and a potted fern but not to me.”
Frances laughed. It was small and wet and broken, but it was a laugh.
“I am not saying he deserves your forgiveness,” Lavinia continued. “I am saying that what you heard may not be the whole truth. Men are remarkably stupid about the things that matter most.”
Frances wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her chest still ached. The hurt was still there,. but beside it now was what felt like hope.
“What do I do?” she whispered.
Lavinia took her hand. Squeezed it. “You wait. And you see.”
A knock sounded at the drawing room door then. The butler appeared. “The Duke of Whitestone has arrived. He is requesting an audience with Her Grace.”
Frances went cold.
Lavinia looked at her. Frances looked back. Neither of them moved.
“Shall I show him in?” the butler asked.
“Yes,” Lavinia sai, before Frances could speak. She squeezed Frances’ hand once and then released it.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor. Frances pressed her palms against her skirt, straightening her spine. She refused to wipe her face because that would mean admitting she had been crying, and she would not give him that. She would not give him anything she had not decided to give.
Alexander appeared in the doorway.
He looked terrible. The word arrived without charity and without exaggeration.
His coat was creased. His cravat was tied with none of his usual precision.
The shadows beneath his eyes were purple-dark, and his jaw carried a day-old tension that had worn grooves into the skin beside his mouth.
He looked like a man who had not slep, or eaten properly or done anything at all except think.
His eyes found hers immediately. Held. Something moved in them—relief, perhaps. Or pain. She could not tell which, and she did not try.
“Frances,” he said.
Lavinia rose. “Alexander. You look dreadful.”
“Thank you.” His gaze did not leave Frances. “I apologize for arriving unannounced. I need to speak with my wife.”
“Of course.” Lavinia moved toward the door. She paused beside Alexander, close enough that whatever she murmured was meant for him alone. Frances could not hear the words, but she saw his jaw tighten. Saw him nod once. Then Lavinia was gone, and the door closed, and they were alone.
The drawing room was very quiet.
Alexander stood near the door. Frances sat on the settee. The distance between them was like a lifetime, an ocean she was not certain she could cross again.
“You have been crying,” he said.
“Yes.”
He took a step forward then stopped. His hands hung at his sides. “I have come to say something to you,” he said. “And I ask that you let me say it before… before you decide anything.”
Frances lifted her chin. “Then say it.”
He drew a breath. His shoulders rose and fell with it.
“For most of my life,” he began, “I believed that love was a weakness. I believed it made men reckless and foolish. I watched my father love my mother—genuinely and deeply—and to provide for her and keep her happy, he gambled.”
“Of course, my mother was content, but he loved to show her off to the world, and he would wager estate after estate to buy her diamonds. I watched that love destroy everything he was supposed to protect. I decided, very young, that I would not make his mistake.”
Frances remained still and silent, her hands flat on her knees while her heart pounded so fiercely, she could feel it in her throat.
“I thought the best things a husband could offer were safety,” Alexander continued. “Stability. Respect. I thought that if I built a life ordered enough, controlled enough, dutiful enough, it would be sufficient for everyone.”
His voice was steady, but his hands were not. She could see the faintest tremor in his fingers—barely visible, entirely unlike him.
“I was wrong.”
The words fell into the room. Simple and unadorned.
“The moment you left, the house stopped feeling like a home. The breakfasts were silent. The library was empty. Emily asked me if you were coming back, and I could not answer her because I did not know, and the not knowing...” He stopped and swallowed. “The not knowing was unbearable.”
Do not hope. Do not hope. He will say something else. He will explain it away. He will—
“I love you.”
Frances’s breath stopped.
“I love your kindness,” he said. “I love your courage. I love the way you understand things I cannot say aloud. I love what you have given Emily, what you have given my home. And I love... I love the way you look at me as though I might be worthy of something better than I have allowed myself to be.”
He took another step forward. His eyes were very blue. Very bright.
“I want your heart,” he said. “If you can still give it. If I have not destroyed any chance of earning it.”
The tears came. She could not stop them. They rose and spilled.
Alexander’s face changed. The composure, or what remained of it, cracked entirely. He moved toward her, his hand reaching, his expression stricken with the particular terror of a man who had made a woman cry and did not know if it was the right kind.
“Frances… I… God, I did not mean to—”
She laughed. It came out wet, broken, half a sob. “You look so frightened.”
“You are weeping.”
“Yes. That is what women do when men say things like that.”
“Is it…is that—”
“Are you certain?” She looked up at him through the blur of tears. “Alexander. Are you certain? Because if this is duty, if you are saying this because you feel obligated…”
“I have never been more certain of anything in my life.”
Frances wiped her face. Drew a shaking breath.
“You hurt me,” she said. “Deeply. What I heard you say to Eleanor…”
Surprise crossed his face. “You heard?”
She nodded.
“I was speaking from fear. I was telling her what I believed the arrangement required because I was too much of a coward to admit, even to myself, that the arrangement had stopped being enough weeks ago.”
The ache in her chest was still there but lighter now.
“One more question,” she said.
“Anything.”
“Do you still want an heir?”
The question sat between them. Heavy with the weight of everything it contained—that first morning at the breakfast table, the terms she had set, the distance those terms had created.
Alexander sank to one knee before the settee. Not in proposal—he had already done that months ago in a study that smelled of ink and obligation. This was different. This was a man coming down to her level because he wanted to look her in the eye when he answered.
“I want you,” he said. “Only you. That is all I have wanted for longer than I have been willing to admit.”
His hand found hers.
“And if God ever blesses us with children, you are the only woman in the world I would want to be their mother. But I am not asking for an heir. I am asking for you.”
Frances looked at him. At the face she had studied across breakfast tables and in carriages and in the lamplight of a storm-dark library.
At the blue eyes that had watched her sleep and thought himself unobserved.
The man who had spent a decade building walls was kneeling before her now with every single one of them in ruins.
She stood. He rose with her.
She stepped closer. Close enough that she could feel the warmth of him.
“I love you,” she said.
His breath caught. She saw it in the way his chest stopped and his eyes widened, and his whole body went still, as though the words had struck him physically.
“I love you,” she said again. “I have loved you for longer than I should have, and I was too afraid to say it, and I am saying it now.”
His hand rose to her face, his palm warm and steady, trembling just a little. He gently tilted her chin up with his thumb.
“Frances,” he said.
She kissed him.
Not the way he had kissed her in the library—uncertain, questioning, bracing for rejection.
This was certain. This was a woman stepping into the space she had earned and claiming it.
Her hands found his chest, pressed flat against the wrinkled fabric of his coat, and his arm came around her waist, pulling her close.
His mouth met hers with a hunger that had nothing to do with storms, lamplight, or the particular weakness of a moment.
This was not a moment. This was a choice.
His fingers slid into her hair. The kiss deepened, and Frances felt everything she had been holding collapse at last. The walls. The distance. The months of measured silence and careful composure and telling herself not to hope.
She hoped. She loved. She stayed.
And Alexander held her as though he would never again make the mistake of letting go.