Chapter 24
“He is.” Evander looked at Mary, still standing beside the rocking chair with her hands clasped and her eyes bright. “He has been in good hands.”
The words reached Mary from across the nursery, and her stomach clenched.
Evander stood beside Richard, who still held Tommy against his chest with the awkward tenderness of a man cradling something breakable.
But Mary’s eyes were on Evander.
On the way, he had repositioned his brother’s arms without hesitation, the sureness in his hands, the instinct that had come from weeks of watching from doorways and corridors and one unforgettable night with a fox story in the dark.
He would make a good father.
The thought arrived unbidden, sharp and clear, and Mary felt it settle into a place inside her that she had not known was empty until this moment filled it.
Evander, who had told her he did not want children.
Evander, who had built walls against every form of love his life had offered him.
That same man had just scolded his brother for holding a baby like a sack of potatoes and instructed him to let Tommy hear his heartbeat.
The competence of it, the ease of it, the way his hands had known exactly where to go…
It broke something open inside Mary’s chest. Something that she could not close again.
Her eyes burned. She blinked and felt the heat rise, and she turned her face toward the window before anyone could see.
She could not lose this. She could not lose Tommy, and she could not lose the man who had learned to hold him because she had taught him without knowing it.
The thought of Charlotte returning, of Tommy being handed back to parents who had not been here, of the house emptying and the nursery going dark, and Evander retreating behind his walls because the arrangement that had forced them together no longer existed, pressed against her ribs with a weight that stole her breath.
“Excuse me.”
Both men looked at her. Mary kept her face turned toward the window.
“I need a moment. Mrs. Bridwell can take Tommy.”
She crossed the nursery without waiting for a response, her steps quick and controlled, and she passed through the doorway and into the corridor and walked to her room at the end of the east corridor.
There, she closed the door and pressed her back against it and pressed her hands over her face.
The tears came. Not many. She would not allow many. But enough to blur the room and make her draw one long, shuddering breath before she forced them back.
Footsteps in the corridor followed by a knock.
“Mary.”
She dropped her hands and wiped her cheeks with the heels of her palms. “I am fine, Evander. Go back to the nursery.”
“Mrs. Bridwell has Tommy. Open the door.”
Mary closed her eyes. She could ignore him. She could stand against this door and wait for his footsteps to retreat, the way they always retreated, and she could swallow what she felt and go on swallowing it until the taste became familiar.
She opened the door.
Evander stood in the corridor, his coat off, his cravat loosened from a morning that had already lasted longer than most men’s entire days. His eyes moved over her face, reading the redness around her eyes, the damp streaks on her cheeks.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what?”
“Whatever it is that made you leave that room.”
Mary stepped back from the doorway, and Evander entered. He did not sit. He stood near the window with his hands at his sides, giving her the space the room allowed, and waited.
Mary pressed her fingers against her collarbone, where Tommy’s fist usually gripped, and the absence of his weight made the words come.
“I cannot lose him.” Her voice was low and unsteady.
“I know the plan. Richard is here, and Charlotte will return, and Tommy will go to his parents, and this house will go back to what it was before we wed. I know that. I agreed to it. But… I have rocked that baby to sleep every night for weeks, Evander. I have learned his sounds. I know which cry means hunger, which means tiredness, and which means he just wants to be held. I know that he prefers my left arm to my right, and that he sleeps better when someone hums. I have memorized him. And now you are asking me to hand him to a mother who has not been here, and a father who may not exist, and I cannot.” Her voice cracked. “I cannot do that.”
Evander watched her. The composure softened, layer by layer, the way morning light softened a room, and what emerged beneath it was not the duke, or the guardian, or the man who managed crises with controlled precision.
It was a man who had told her he’d always come back.
“And it is not only Tommy.” Mary pressed on before courage could fail her. “It is this. Us. Whatever this has become.” She met his eyes. “I do not want to lose that, either.”
The room went quiet. Sunlight fell across the floor between them, and the sounds of the house drifted in from below, muffled and distant.
Evander crossed to her. He stopped close enough that she could see the exhaustion in his eyes, the tension in his jaw, and the effort it was costing him to stand still.
“I can give you a child.”
Mary stared at him.
“If what you want is a baby of your own, I can give you that.” His voice was steady, but his hands were not.
He clasped them behind his back, the way he did when he was holding himself together.
“A son or a daughter. Yours. And I would help raise the child, the same way I have helped with Tommy. I would provide for you both. I would be present. I would not disappear.”
Mary’s lips parted. The offer hung between them, enormous and devastating, and she waited for the rest of it. The part that would make it whole.
“But I cannot be the husband you want me to be.” Evander’s gaze held hers, and the steadiness in it was the steadiness of a man walking a ledge.
“I do not disregard what has happened between us, Mary. The time we have spent. I am not dismissing any of it. But I have watched what passion does when it takes hold. It consumed my father. It destroyed this family. And I will not risk becoming what he became. Not to you. Not to a child.”
Mary felt each word arrive separately, like stones dropped into water, and the surface she had been standing on rippled and sank beneath her feet.
“You are offering me a child,” she said, “without offering me a real marriage.”
“I am offering you what I am capable of giving.”
“And love is not included.”
Evander’s jaw worked. His hands stayed clasped behind his back. “I am asking you to think about it. That is all. Consider what I am offering.”
“You’re offering everything except you.”
He held her gaze for three more seconds. Then he turned and walked to the door.
“Think about it,” he said.
The door closed behind him. His footsteps faded down the corridor, steady and measured, the way they always were, as though the man producing them had not just offered his wife a child and withheld himself in the same breath.
Mary stood in the center of her bedroom and opened her mouth to call after him. To shout. To say every furious, wounded thing that pressed against her teeth.
How dare he?
How dare he stand in her room and offer her a baby the way another man might offer a new gown, as though motherhood were a consolation prize for a marriage he refused to inhabit. How dare he kiss her and then deliver a proposal stripped of the one thing that made any of it bearable.
But the shout did not come. The fury rose and crested and broke, and what lay beneath it was not anger.
It was a loss. The sound of his footsteps growing fainter. The click of his study door closing two floors below. The distance between them was expanding, not because he was walking away, but because he had just shown her, with absolute clarity, how close he was willing to come—
And where he intended to stop.
And the pain of it, the specific, precise pain of watching Evander walk out of her room after offering her everything except himself, told Mary what she had been circling for weeks.
She was in love with him.
She was in love with him, fully and completely, the way a person is in love when the absence of the other feels like a missing limb and the presence of them feels like coming home.
And the man she loved had just told her, in the kindest and most devastating way possible, that he would give her a child, but not his heart.
Mary sat on the edge of the bed. She pressed her hands against her knees, stared at the floor, and breathed until the shaking stopped.
She could rage against that. She could storm into his study and demand that he tear the walls down, and perhaps the fury would crack something loose, and perhaps it would only drive him further behind the stone.
Or she could accept what he offered.
A child. A family. His presence, but not his heart. The warmth of his body beside hers, the partnership of raising whatever children might follow, the life of a duchess who was cared for in every material way, but loved in none.
Mary pressed her palms harder against her knees.
It was not enough. She knew that. A marriage without love was the arrangement Evander had proposed in a parlor six weeks ago, and Mary had spent every day since watching it become something more, and settling for less would be a betrayal of everything they had built.
But a marriage without Evander was worse.
She stood. She washed her face. She pinned her hair. She went to the nursery and took Tommy from Mrs. Bridwell and spent the rest of the morning walking the corridors with the baby on her shoulder, humming melodies that had no words, and she did not go downstairs.