Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
It is my wedding night.
Heat flooded her chest so suddenly she recoiled from the bedside table. The prayer book lying there felt like an accusation.
Across the room, the adjoining door waited.
It was only a panel of dark wood with a brass handle that winked in the dying firelight.
But to Emmeline, it felt like a living thing, a presence at her back that she could not ignore.
On the other side was the Duke. Perhaps he was already undressed.
Perhaps he was sitting by his own fire, his mind occupied by estates or his missing sister.
Or perhaps he was waiting for her.
She pressed a palm against her stomach, trying to steady the frantic fluttering there. But beneath the nerves, something warmer was taking root.
A reckless, forbidden curiosity.
A want so sharp it felt like a bruise.
She found herself wondering, with a vividness that made her skin prickle, what it would feel like if a man so terrifyingly controlled finally broke. She hated the wanting most of all.
Emmeline stood paralyzed until the silence of the room became unbearable. If she didn’t move now, she never would. She crossed the floor barefoot, the cool wood smooth beneath her soles, the silk of her nightgown whispering against her ankles.
Her fingers brushed the brass handle. It was cold, but her palm was a furnace. She took one shallow, jagged breath, curled her hand around the metal, and turned it.
She pushed the door open.
The sitting room between them was dim, lit by only one lamp left burning on a small table. She passed through it quickly, because if she stopped there, she might lose her nerve. The second door stood half-closed.
She raised her hand and knocked once.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the Duke’s voice came from within, low and rough. “Enter.”
Emmeline pushed the door open.
He turned from the window at once and the sight of him struck her so hard that she forgot the words she had prepared.
The Duke stood near the fire in a white linen shirt, exposing a small portion of bronzed skin and the strong column of his neck.
His dark hair was slightly disordered, as though he had dragged a hand through it more than once.
The firelight caught the hard planes of his face and cast shadows beneath his cheekbones.
His gaze moved over her.
Slowly, his eyes traveled from her unbound hair down to the thin, white silk stretched over her breasts. He tracked the slow rise and fall of her breath, then followed the line of her waist and the curve of her hips all the way to her bare toes against the rug.
By the time his eyes climbed back to hers, she could hardly breathe.
She felt stripped. Exposed. A frantic, liquid heat pooled low in her belly, heavy enough to make her knees feel weak. No one had ever looked at her this way.
“What are you doing?” he asked quietly.
Emmeline had known this might be difficult. She had known she might tremble, might blush, might feel foolish standing before him in nothing but a nightgown. But she had not prepared herself for the bluntness of that question.
Still, she lifted her chin. “It is our wedding night.”
He did not move.
The silence after her answer seemed to thicken, pressing against her bare arms and throat.
“I am aware,” he said at last.
“Then you know why I am here.”
His mouth tightened. “You should return to your room.”
The rejection landed before the meaning fully formed. It struck deep, beneath pride, beneath reason. Heat flooded her face. Her fingers curled into the fabric of her nightgown, but she refused to look away.
“My room?” she repeated. “You informed me that my chambers adjoined yours.”
“They do.”
“And yet you are surprised I used the door?”
“I did not place you there for this.”
She swallowed, and the movement hurt.
“No,” she said softly. “Of course not. How foolish of me to imagine a husband might mean something by placing his wife within reach.”
His eyes flashed. “Do not twist my meaning.”
“I am trying to find your meaning, Your Grace. It appears determined to hide behind every cold sentence you offer me.”
His nostrils flared slightly. “We married because of scandal, not affection.”
“I was present at the ceremony.”
His gaze sharpened at her words, but he did not soften. If anything, he looked more rigid, more controlled. “We do not need to perform every duty of marriage simply because society has named us husband and wife.”
She wished suddenly, violently, that she had stayed in her chamber. That she had not perfumed her skin. That she had not stood before the mirror wondering if he would like her hair loose.
She stepped back once.
His eyes dropped to the movement, and something roughened in his face. “Emmeline.”
“No.” Her voice shook, but only for a breath before she steadied it. “Do not say my name as though you have not just made it plain I have mistaken my place.”
His hand flexed at his side. “You have not.”
“Then what is my place?” she demanded, the question breaking from her before she could soften it. “Duchess? A mother in all but name to your son? A solution to a scandal? Am I to sit at your table, manage your household, smile before your servants, and then disappear when the house grows quiet?”
“You are twisting this into an insult.”
“Because it feels like one.”
His jaw tightened so sharply she saw the muscle shift. “I am trying not to insult you.”
The laugh that escaped her was small and wounded. “Then you have chosen a strange method.”
Rowan looked away for the first time, toward the fire, and in the flickering light she saw his whole body was too tense, his breath too controlled, his hands held too carefully still at his sides.
That knowledge should have comforted her. Instead, it made the rejection worse. If he did want her, then this was not about her body failing to stir him. It was about some colder decision, some private door barred against her before she had even knocked.
“Why?” she asked.
He did not answer.
Emmeline stepped forward, anger and hurt pushing her past caution. “Why, Rowan?”
The use of his name altered something. His eyes returned to hers at once, darker now, his control visibly tightening around him.
“This is not a matter for tonight,” he said.
“It is exactly a matter for tonight.”
His voice dropped. “You do not know what you are asking.”
“I know that I came here as your wife, and you told me to leave.”
He flinched. The sight gave her a cruel little thread of courage.
“Is it because of your late wife?” she asked before she could stop herself.
The room went cold.
Rowan’s expression closed with such force that she almost regretted the question.
But a ghost had stood between them since before the wedding.
Emmeline did not know its shape, only that Aaron’s grief went silent whenever it appeared, and Rowan retreated from anything that looked too much like tenderness.
“My late wife has nothing to do with this.”
“You do not speak of her. You do not allow Aaron to speak of her. You guard every mention of the past as if a single word might crack the floor beneath us. And now you say this marriage need not be a marriage at all.” Her throat tightened.
“Am I wrong to wonder if there is still a ghost in this house?”
His eyes burned into hers. “Do not speak of things you do not understand.”
“Then help me understand.”
“No.” The word was flat.
Emmeline’s breath hitched. A cold weight settled in the center of her chest, expanding until it hit her ribs, then igniting into a sudden, blinding heat.
“No,” she repeated. “That is all you ever give. No, stop, do not ask, do not speak, do not feel. Aaron is not to grieve. I am not to expect. You are not to explain. Is that how this house survives, Your Grace? By forbidding every feeling before it can become inconvenient?”
His shoulders rose with a slow breath. “You know nothing of what feeling can cost.”
The quietness of it struck her harder than if he had shouted. For a moment, she saw his face in the carriage as he looked at his sleeping son and her anger faltered.
“I know what it costs to lose someone,” she said, her voice softer now, but no less intense. “I know what it costs to watch a house grow quiet after laughter has left it. Do not stand there and tell me I know nothing of grief simply because I do not use silence as proof of endurance.”
Something in his expression shifted. It moved through his eyes first, a flash of recognition perhaps, or pain, then vanished behind that hard mask again.
His eyes dropped to her throat. The movement was slow this time, helplessly slow, as though he could not stop himself from following the rhythm there. Her body answered with a rush of heat that mortified her.
Even now.
“I will provide for you,” he said, voice rougher. “I will protect you. I will see that your father wants for nothing. You shall have authority in my house, respect before my servants, and every comfort due to your position.”
“And affection?” she asked.
His mouth hardened.
“And children?” she continued, though the question felt like stepping barefoot over glass. “Will I have those too? Or are they also an unnecessary motion?”
His expression changed at once and Emmeline already knew what he would say.
“No,” he said.
The simplicity of it stole her breath. “No?”
“I already have an heir.”
Her lips parted, but no sound came at first. Nothing emotional—only that hard, practical sentence, delivered as if she had asked after estate accounts.
“I see,” she whispered.
But she did not see. Not really. Her mind could not shape itself around a life with no children of her own, no family grown from love.
His gaze sharpened, as though he heard the break in her voice. “Emmeline—”
“You have decided this too?” she asked, and now the hurt was so large it made her calm. “Like everything else?”
His jaw clenched. “I have decided that I will not bring more children into this house.”
“Because you already have the one required of you.”