Chapter 20
“In secret we met. In silence I grieve. That thy heart could forget. Thy spirit deceive.”
Lord Byron
All Fleur’s resolve, hope, and optimism vanished in an instant, replaced suddenly by anxiety as Henry extended his arm and urged her ahead.
He didn’t walk next to her. Instead, he marched her ahead, like a shepherd guiding a recalcitrant child he had no time or patience for.
Stop it. You’re being irrational.
He was simply being formal.
Whatever row she came upon with him and Lord Cassian had been between them. The business Henry’s man-of-affairs had been attending was the source of their quarrel. Why should it have anything to do with Fleur?
It really had been irrational to believe it had to do with her. Frustration melted into embarrassment; her emotions were tangled and difficult to name.
In fact, by the time she arrived in the Portrait Hall and Henry shut the door with a firm click behind them, Fleur had already composed herself as she faced him.
“I wanted—”
The sight of Henry lounging against the strong oak panel, his enormous arms folded across his enormous chest, froze the words on her tongue.
She stared unblinking at his glorious frame. A tender emotion choked her, making it hard to swallow. She had wanted it to be him. So badly, she had wanted that stranger—laughing and discussing poetry and books—to be this man.
Now she wondered that she had been so blind. How had she failed to see that the warrior’s physique of her lover could belong to this man and this man only?
Henry’s impervious voice penetrated her sigh-worthy musings. “You were saying?”
Fleur frowned. “You are upset.”
He raised a frosty, ducal eyebrow. “What gave you that impression?”
“You’re not smiling and sound like a bear, and you were putting your hands on Lord Cassian when I came upon you. Oh, and I also heard you shouting,” Fleur replied, ticking off her observations.
Fleur had forgotten how easy it was to disarm him.
He steadied himself and asked evenly, “What reasons would I have to be upset?”
She had forgotten how proud he was. It also provided her a window to explain everything. “I failed to arrive at your affair. There will be gossip.”
“I’m not upset, madam. I do not get upset. I’m annoyed that you keep creating little scandals around me. I’m annoyed you’ve called me away from my event,” Henry replied, his voice edged with annoyance.
Fleur’s voice quaked as she asked, “And Lady Angela?” Bitterness crept in despite herself.
His lack of a denial was a confirmation.
Anguish knotted deep inside her, pushing away the fleeting confidence she had relied on yesterday. What had become of yesterday’s avenger? Where was the man who held her close and pledged to help?
Head and heart equally heavy, Fleur turned around slowly, passing sorrowful eyes around the room as she did. She noted the Hartwell duchesses through time. All of them regal. All of them pure. All of them perfect like Lady Angela.
“…You need to tell him, Lady Fleur. If you don’t, you will regret it, and I have known Hart long enough to promise you, he will too…”
Fleur was beginning to think Lord Cassian didn’t know the Duke of Hartwell as well as he claimed…
This was futile…
It is only futile if you let it be.
Fleur didn’t realize she’d done a full circle until she came back around and faced Henry.
“There is something you wanted from me, Fleur?”
She stared unblinkingly at this big, proud, powerful man before her.
“…Everyone wants something from him. His staff. His tenants. His peers. Me. Even Tremaine, his brother. He cannot conceive of a world where there is someone who just wants…”
Fleur shook her head.
“No.” She wanted everything from him: his heart, his body, his name. “I wanted to—needed to speak with you.”
Her speech faltered. But how to start? What to say?
She gave him a tender smile. “I have something I need to share. I’ve needed to for a long time. I don’t really know how or where or…”
He was once impatient with her prattling. Now, he had become her friend, free and without censure. She searched for that kindness, desperate to see her friend—not the cold duke merely tolerating her for his brother’s sake.
It would be a great deal easier to share what was in her heart if he behaved like he had one.
Instead, she was met with a cold, detached stranger. Fleur caught herself fisting and un-fisting her lace-overlay satin skirts. To still her worrying hands, she laid them upon her once perfectly flat belly. That fluttering feeling she had felt for months appeared under her hand.
Fleur stilled. Her troubled thoughts about Henry scattered.
A babe.
Her and Henry’s babe.
Awed by the slight movement, she lifted joyful eyes to Henry. She wanted to share this moment with him.
He directed his gaze to the place where she cradled herself. His eyes narrowed.
Her stomach gave a nauseating jolt—one that had nothing to do with her child.
Fleur dropped her arms quickly.
She searched for warmth but instead felt a chill settle, her initial hope now overtaken by disappointment.
What accounted for this coldness? She needed him to be tender, protective, and loyal. Not the imperious, condescending duke. Maybe he didn’t know she needed tenderness. He should have sensed it—especially after yesterday when she exposed her secrets and he promised to help her.
A night’s reflection appeared to have reawakened his disdain. It had strengthened his conviction of her unworthiness. She had been foolish to believe he would embrace her love. Not with his future duchess, Lady Angela, beside him.
Cowardice slipped back in. Fleur eyed the door for a long moment.
“You cannot undo in mere weeks what the last duke took thirty years to build.”
The whisper of Kilmartin’s reminder was the only thing keeping her in place.
Her earnest hope for a life with Henry and their child rested on her words now.
“There is so much to say, I don’t even know where to start,” she murmured.
Always at the beginning—the McQuoid beginning.
He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. Fleur hugged herself and stared past him.
“My family’s tradition of marriages built on love comes from centuries ago.
There was a fateful encounter at the Fairy Pools that united a McQuoid lass and a lad from opposing sides of a bitter family feud.
They fell deeply in love. The McQuoid lass sneaked out to handfast themselves, but the McQuoids were waiting.
They captured Lord John, imprisoning him in a tower.
She defied her family and everything to be with him.
She leaped some six feet from her tower to Lord John’s to b-be… ”
Henry withdrew his watch fob and consulted the timepiece.
Fleur stumbled in her telling.
“Madam, I have an assembly awaiting my return,” he said, tucking that gold heirloom back inside his jacket.
Humiliated, heat spilled along her neck and cheeks. “Y-Yes, of course.”
Had she expected he would be enraptured with the tale of love when he himself neither believed in nor had ever experienced it firsthand?
Even if he had the romantic spirit, the fact remained that he was missing from an event he was hosting.
Logic said to let him return. That they could continue later.
Her soul, however, said if she let him, it would be the last solitary meeting they had together.
She hastened to collapse what she needed and wanted to say into the short time.
“Lore is strong in my family. We are romantic, grand, and given to scandal. I always knew what I wanted: a gentleman with a big laugh, a character as scandalous as my family. He wouldn’t mind me being…what I am.”
She held her breath, hoping he would remind her of her wonderful qualities. Not liken her to the other McQuoids.
She was fated to hold her breath. There came no grand rush to her defense.
Restless, Fleur wandered over to the portrait of Henry as a boy. She stared up at him, searching for a trace of vulnerability in his likeness.
“That night at Lord and Lady Rutland’s seemed magical. It was forbidden and thrilling. Mine was supposed to be a grand story built for legend and lore.”
Her nape tingled from the burn of his gaze upon her.
Fleur turned back. “But it wasn’t real, Henry. It was fun and romantic, what I thought I wanted,” she said softly.
His lack of disdain gave her a quiet sign of hope.
“It wasn’t very long ago, yet it feels like forever. So much has changed. I am different now.”
For a moment, she caught a wistful glimmer in his eyes.
Whatever had happened between last night and now, her Henry was still in there.
“I thought I knew what I wanted and then I met y-you…” Her throat convulsed.
“You were responsible and honorable. I didn’t realize how much I longed for someone who would make me feel safe and seen.
Someone who was solemn when the moments warranted.
Someone who loved books as I do. Who could laugh with me and make me laugh. ”
Fleur paused to draw a faltering breath. Her eyes burned.
“You make me laugh, Henry.” She came closer, needing his warmth. “You made me rethink all that I believed about family, loyalty, and love.”
Until him, she blindly followed her family. She hadn’t seen their faults or their tendency to close others out.
“You love so deeply, you sent Jeremy to us to save him. You knew your household was free of laughter. You couldn’t have it for yourself, so you ensured Jeremy would—even if it meant you were left behind.”
God, how she loved him.
Fleur lifted her stare. Her tear-filled eyes blinded his beautiful visage. “My family should have welcomed you as they did Jeremy.” Instead, they judged him simply because he possessed a gravity her kin didn’t.
He held himself so rigid it was a wonder he did not break.
As if he could; Henry was an impregnable fortress of a man. But he shouldn’t have to be.
A melancholy smile flickered on her lips. “I have never met anyone like you, Henry,” she whispered.
“Not even your mystery lover?”