Chapter 15 #2
“We are to wed,” he said, his voice quiet but resolute.
Audrey blinked. The words struck her like lightning, stalling even the air in her lungs.
He was serious. The set of his jaw, the steadiness of his gaze, left no room for jest.
Hope. Tiny golden threads of it spun silently inside her chest, fragile and glimmering.
Was this what she had longed for? Was he professing regard? Declaring, at last, that their connection meant something to him?
“You can return to Stirling to treat patients as a married woman,” he added, the words breaking the spell.
Audrey’s heart thudded once, a slow and painful realization blooming. She frowned in confusion, studying his face.
“It will be a … marriage of convenience,” he clarified, his tone cautious. “You will have the protection of my name so you may pursue your goals without impediment.”
The fragile threads of hope snapped.
Her shoulders sank back against the chair, the weight of disappointment too heavy to resist. Her limbs felt leaden, her chest hollow.
It was a resolution, she supposed, but not the one she had longed for.
Somewhere inside her, hidden even from herself, had lived the hope that Julius Trafford had come to care for her.
That he might want her at his side as more than a woman to be shielded.
Instead, she was to become a symbol. A ward. A project for his honor to redeem.
She reached for a linen napkin, dabbing at her face, determined to compose herself. This was not how she wished to be remembered—tearful, disheveled, unguarded. A physician must master herself, always.
She cleared her throat quietly and spoke with deliberate calm.
“So not a real marriage?”
“That is correct,” he admitted quietly.
Audrey flinched, just the tiniest movement, but it struck him like a blow.
Her jaw flexed and her silver eyes narrowed in defense, as though she had taken a punch and meant to remain upright regardless.
She did not speak, but something within her shuttered.
He felt it, like a door closing somewhere deep in a silent house.
Still, he owed her honesty. He would not lie, not to Audrey. He liked her far too well for that. He admired her. And more … though he dared not think what more might entail.
She inhaled through her nose, her voice like the scrape of silk over a sharp edge.
“What of … Do you intend to … Will we live apart?”
The question made his throat close. It seemed laughable. He had not been able to think of anyone—anything—but her since their first kiss. Her scent haunted his coat.
“I suppose we will,” he said at last and felt like a heel.
Audrey’s lips thinned. Her expression turned stony.
“The terms of our agreement,” she repeated it aloud, softly but with cold deliberation, as though testing the taste of something foreign and unpalatable.
Julius’s nerves prickled. She was going to refuse him. He felt it like a tremor in the air before a storm. A rising certainty that if he did not anchor this moment now, he might lose her entirely.
He could not name the precise reason he needed her to accept. Duty, perhaps. Gratitude. The innate urge to protect what was his, even if she was not and never would be.
“I do not wish to inconvenience you so. It is not your responsibility.”
“I have no plans to marry, so this is not a hardship, I can assure you. You can continue your life the way you planned.”
She did not appear convinced, her face still set in unhappy lines. He tried to think of something to say, but she beat him to it. “My father left me an income. I shall leave England. Perhaps I can move to Paris and make up a dead husband.”
Paris? What was it with the women in his life and their endless fascination with France? It seemed a grand conspiracy designed to keep him at a distance, as though they all somehow knew he could not endure the rigors of sea travel and so ensured he would never trouble them again.
“No!” The sharpness in his own tone startled him.
Julius winced. He was meant to be charming, unflappable, yet since that fateful day he had set out with Audrey, he seemed to have mislaid his very nature.
“No, I would not hear any of that. As my wife, you would have independence. You should never want for funds. You would be a future countess. None would dare slight you. Even Lady Astley must eat her words once the world knows we are wed. I … wish this, Audrey.”
She turned her face aside, studying her fingernails with deliberate care. “So, you wish to wed me … yet you do not wish to be my husband.”
Gadzooks, that sounds terrible!
But it was true.
He was a childish clot who resisted maturity at every turn. Any one of his friends would have agreed without hesitation. They would chuckle and say it with fondness, but say it nonetheless.
“Perhaps … a babe would be possible?”
He had not planned to say it. Certainly had not thought it through. But the moment the words left his mouth, he saw her expression shift. The cool mask cracked ever so slightly. Something soft and unspoken glimmered in her gaze.
A babe.
A child.
His child?
Julius twisted the signet ring on his finger, suddenly unsure of the shape of his own desires.
He did not know what he wanted from Audrey, only that he was not ready to lose her.
He needed distance and time to wrestle with the unrecognizable chaos she had stirred in him.
If she left, she would take that possibility with her, and he would be left with nothing but regret.
But a babe?
He felt the words echo in his own mind. It was a foreign concept. He had always assumed he would die without heirs. He had sworn never to marry, and therefore issue had never been a matter of concern.
Issue?
What a strange word. What a terrifying, luminous possibility.
Julius curled his lip in faint disgust, unable to prevent the visceral reaction.
Deuce it, he had been reading far too much of Debrett’s.
Next, he would be referring to matrimony as “alliances” and women as “prospects.” This was precisely the sort of ghastly propriety he had long scorned, the festering rot of polite society that wormed into a man’s vocabulary and settled into his bones like structural rot.
And yet here he was, using that same language to propose an arrangement of marriage to the only woman who had ever made him forget to sneer at the institution.
Audrey remained silent, caught in thought.
She nibbled at her lower lip, a habit he had found endearing, though just now it seemed fraught with tension.
She looked too pale, her lashes casting soft shadows over her cheekbones as she stared somewhere just beyond him.
He could almost see the calculations behind her gaze, weighing sacrifice against survival, pride against ruin.
At last, she exhaled.
“I shall accept those terms,” she said, each word measured like a physician dispensing an unpleasant but necessary treatment.
“But I do not agree to you parading through London with your paramours without my approval. If the terms of our agreement change, I expect to be informed. And if they do …” Her silver gaze found his.
“Then I shall not wish to see you again. If you find the need to pursue other women, I will raise our child alone, and you will stay far from Stirling.”
Her words stunned him. Calm. Cold. Conditional. And entirely justified.
Julius’s breath caught in his chest. Was it relief he felt? Or a pang of something deeper? Something that twisted uncomfortably beneath his ribs and defied easy categorization.
You are a irredeemable cad, he thought. But at least she will be safe.
He nodded slowly, the weight of her terms settling around his shoulders like a cloak he had no business wearing.
There would be time later, he hoped, to sort through his discomfort, to unpack the strange mix of duty, guilt, and a growing tenderness that felt dangerously like affection.
For now, her agreement was a lifeline, and he grasped it with both hands.
Audrey gestured at the crumpled letter with a frown of distaste. “What do I do about … this?” She spoke the word as if the page were a viper, coiled and ready to strike.
Julius straightened. “Brendan has asked the duke to procure a special license. We should be married before the week is out. I shall arrange for announcements to appear in the news sheets.”
He crossed the room and picked up the letter between two fingers, as one might remove an insect from a tablecloth.
“As for Lady Astley … ignore her. The woman thrives on outrage. We shall remain here under guard until the matter with Scott is resolved. Thereafter, we depart for Stirling. I will call upon your vicar and set his qualms to rest.”
“As you wish,” Audrey replied, her tone cool, measured, and void of any warmth.
The words ought to have settled matters, yet Julius found they twisted like thorns in his chest. He hated this distance between them.
The strained civility, the quiet ache that echoed with everything unspoken.
The contrast between her earlier laughter, her ardor, her teasing intelligence and this bleak acquiescence was nearly intolerable.
Stuff it. I ought to have spoken to her last night.
She was plainly unhappy. It was written in the tight set of her jaw, the dull sheen of her eyes.
Audrey Gideon was not a woman designed for passivity.
She had faced down his fevered madness, defied a would-be killer, and mended a half-dead starling without complaint.
And now she sat before him, quiet and resigned, and he could not bear it.
She deserved better. She deserved a husband who would stand at her side with pride, who would shout down Lady Astley and cradle her heart as reverently as she did her healing tools.
But the very notion of becoming that man left him paralyzed.
The idea of marriage in earnest—of gradually hardening into his father’s likeness, of growing remote and brittle over time—made his skin crawl.
Julius had spent his life defying Lord Snarling’s dictates, clinging to his liberty like a lifeline.
The mere thought of domestic stagnation conjured the scent of aged ledgers and cold port, of disappointed silences and generations of inherited resentment.
Perhaps, he considered, once we are wed, I will find a better solution. Perhaps then the fog in my mind will lift.
Yet every attempt at clarity only churned his thoughts further into confusion.
It hardly helped that he had recently been stabbed, lost his faculties to fever, and still had a murderer to apprehend. Frankly, it was an inconvenient time to be experiencing what might well be the tender beginnings of love.
He sighed and glanced toward the window, half-hoping to see his father returning early.
A row with the earl would do him good. Clear the cobwebs, ignite his convictions.
Arguing with Lord Snarling had always been oddly cathartic, a ritual that crystallized Julius’s sense of identity.
Nothing reaffirmed his position like fervently disagreeing with his dear papa.
Failing that, he would have conferred with his excellent new chum, except his excellent new chum was the problem.
Audrey Gideon had proven a partner more capable and invigorating than any friend he had ever known.
He had passed an entire week in her company without once longing to flee or throttle her.
That was a first. She challenged him, understood him, made him laugh, and for his sins, made him ache with longing.
Now he could not distinguish between guilt for having ruined her reputation and the deeper, murkier truth that he liked her. Truly liked her. Liked her mind, her humor, her spirit.
Everything was a blur. Duty, desire, affection, protection. It all bled into a single, swirling mass of impossible emotion.
Still, one thing was clear.
She must not disappear.
Audrey must not cross the Channel. The thought alone made him nauseous. If she fled to France, he would be forced to follow, and even imagining the pitch of a ship’s deck beneath his boots brought a sour sting to his throat.
He had endured the voyage home from the Grand Tour with clenched teeth and green gills. He had no intention of ever boarding another cursed boat.
No. Audrey had to remain on English soil. She had to remain his, in whatever half-formed way she would allow, until he could make sense of his tangled heart.