Chapter Seven #2
“I know. It’s why my mother could scarcely bear to look at me during the last years.” He touched his younger self’s face. “She said I had his looks but hoped I’d inherited her sense.”
“You have both. His intelligence. Her strength.”
“His propensity for obsession,” he countered. “Her need for control.”
“Their love for you.” She pointed to the way both painted parents inclined subtly toward the child between them. “Whatever their faults, they loved you.”
“Love wasn’t enough to save either of them.”
“No,” she agreed. “But it was enough to save you. Your mother’s love kept you from following your father’s path. And perhaps…”
“Perhaps what?”
“Perhaps it is time to stop living in reaction to their ghosts.”
He was silent for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and threw open the heavy curtains. Pale daylight spilled across dust and memory.
“It’s smaller than I remembered,” he said quietly. “Less… ominous.”
“Most childhood terrors are.”
“This was no childhood terror. This was an adult catastrophe inflicted upon a child.” But his voice had gentled.
Celine moved to the desk and began gathering the scattered papers with calm, deft hands. “What do you wish to do with all of this?”
“Burn it,” he said at once—and then, after a pause, “No. Archive it. Painful history is still history.”
“Very philosophical.”
“Very practical.” He joined her, helping sort the papers with careful deliberation. “Those who forget the past repeat it. Though I doubt I’m in danger of developing a gambling addiction.”
“No, you’ve developed the opposite problem. An addiction to control.”
“Better than the alternative.”
“Is it, though?” She paused in her sorting. “Your father lost control and died quickly. You’re maintaining perfect control and dying slowly. Neither seems ideal.”
“And what would you suggest?”
“Balance. Moderation. The occasional risk that won’t destroy everything if it fails.”
“Such as?”
“Such as marrying a woman you barely knew because her father lost at cards.”
He actually smiled—a real, full smile that transformed his face. “That was calculated risk, not impulse.”
“Was it? You knew nothing about me except that I’d refused three suitors and had a tendency toward stubbornness.”
“I knew more than that.”
“Oh?”
He moved closer, close enough that she could smell his cologne, that mixture of smoke and winter she was beginning to associate with danger.
“I knew you read Gothic novels in conservatories to avoid dancing. I knew you wore colours that suited you rather than what fashion dictated. I knew you visited your friend Miss Hartwell every Tuesday even after her father’s bankruptcy made her an exile.
I knew you donated your pin money to the orphanage on Drury Lane rather than spending it on ribbons. ”
Her breath caught. “You investigated me?”
“I noticed you.”
“For how long?”
“Three Seasons.” His hand brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I watched you refuse Ashworth for being dull. Faxtone because his mother disapproved. Sir Gerald because he reminded you of your father’s weakness. Yet you never noticed me watching. Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“I didn’t know—until your father sat at that card table and I realised circumstance might place you within my reach.”
The words were outrageous. They should have offended her. Instead, heat curled through her.
“You planned it.”
“I anticipated the inevitable. Your father was a mathematical certainty. That matters unfolded when they did…” His mouth twisted. “You may call it fate, if you like.”
“You don’t believe in fate.”
“I didn’t.” His eyes held hers. “But then you came down that staircase—quite determined to confront me—and I found myself reconsidering.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m standing in a room I haven’t entered in twenty years, with the one woman who consistently disarms me—and I’m thinking about kissing her despite every sensible argument to the contrary.”
Celine’s pulse fluttered. “That is the most romantic thing you have said since our wedding.”
“It is the most truthful.”
“I had thought truth was romantic.”
“Is it?” He stepped a fraction closer, as if drawn, then stopped himself.
“Then perhaps I should admit more than is prudent.” His voice softened.
“You occupy my thoughts far more than is comfortable. I imagine what it might be like to hold you… to feel you near…” He exhaled, a quiet, unsteady sound. “And I fear I reveal too much.”
“Stop.” Her voice trembled.
“Why? I thought you wanted honesty.”
“I want…” She gathered herself, feeling heat rise to her cheeks. “I want you to kiss me without performance or pretence. Not because circumstance presses us, or because you think it expected. Only because you wish to.”
His breath caught. “Because I wish to?”
“Unless I misinterpret.”
“I do not know,” he admitted, stepping into her space. “I have never felt anything quite like this. It is… highly inconvenient.”
“Most feelings are.”
“Which is why I avoid them.”
“And yet?”
“And yet.” His hand rose, cupping her cheek. “You make me consider the merits of inconvenience.”
His lips touched hers—or perhaps found hers—for the kiss unfolded with deliberate care.
She felt the moment he chose restraint, even as desire simmered beneath every measured movement.
He kissed her deeply but unhurriedly, as though memorising her.
Reverent. Controlled—though she sensed how narrowly.
Her knees weakened. His fingers slipped into her hair, holding her with a tenderness that steadied more than it claimed. Time thinned, then simply ceased.
When he at last drew back, they were both unsteady, breath mingling between them.
“That was...” she began.
“Ill-advised,” he supplied, though his voice was rough with anything but regret.
“I was going to say perfect.”
“It can be both.” He stepped back, putting distance between them that felt like continents. “We have twenty-six more days.”
“Of locked doors,” she said softly. “Not of avoiding each other.”
“The locked door exists for a reason.”
“To give me time to adjust. I am adjusting rather quickly.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Then tell me.”
“I consummate a marriage with a woman who barely knows me. Who agreed under duress. Who deserves more than being bedded by a man still learning how to be human.”
His honesty stunned her. “You think you are protecting me?”
“I think I am preventing us from making an irreversible mistake.”
“Some mistakes,” she whispered, “are worth making.”
“Not this one.” He moved toward the door. “Not yet.”
“When?”
“When you can look at me and see a man—not a puzzle, not a project, not a beast. And when I can look at you and see my wife—not a beautiful woman I effectively purchased. When we know what we truly want. Not what we believe we ought to want.”
He left then.
Celine remained in the quiet room, surrounded by dust, ghosts—and the unmistakable sense that something within the Duke of Rothwest had shifted.
She looked around again. The room seemed different now with sunlight streaming through the open curtains. Less haunted. More reclaimable.
Perhaps, she thought, like its owner.
She straightened the papers methodically, setting aside ledgers for proper archiving, smoothing old letters. But her mind drifted constantly—to his confession, his touch, the taste of his restraint, the promise in the kiss he had called ill-advised.
Twenty-six more days.
She doubted either of them would endure them unchanged.
***
The rest of the day passed in a curious sort of domesticity.
They worked side by side in companionable silence, sorting and stacking twenty years of abandoned papers.
Now and then their hands brushed as they reached for the same document; each accidental touch sent a small, treacherous spark up Celine’s arm.
By evening, the study was transformed—cleaned, ordered, its ghosts if not banished then at least named and neatly filed away.
“Thank you,” he said at last, as they stood surveying their work. “I could not have done this alone.”
“Yes, you could. You simply would not have.”
“Perhaps.” He rolled his shoulders, and she saw the faint wince he tried to suppress.
“You’re in pain.”
“It is nothing. An old riding injury that makes itself known when I overexert.”
Without thinking, she moved behind him, placing her hands on his shoulders. He stiffened immediately.
“Relax,” she said. “I’m not going to assassinate you.”
“I’m not entirely convinced of that.”
But he did not pull away. Slowly, inch by inch, he surrendered his weight to her touch as she worked her fingers into the tight muscles. She could feel the heat of his body through his shirt, the contained strength beneath the tension.
“Where did you learn this?” he asked at length, his voice a shade rougher than usual.
“My sister Anne suffers dreadful headaches. I discovered this helps.”
“This is helping,” he admitted, then hastily amended, “It is… tolerably effective.”
She laughed softly. “High praise from the Duke of Rothwest.”
“I have a reputation to maintain.”
“Your reputation is safe with me.”
He turned then, catching her hands in his. “Is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You are dangerous, Celine.” His thumb brushed her knuckles, almost absently. “You make me want things I have trained myself not to need. You make me imagine possibilities I have deliberately excluded.”
“Such as?”
“Such as happiness. Companionship. A marriage that amounts to more than a ledger entry.”
“They sound like very reasonable desires.”
“Good things are the most perilous of all,” he said quietly. “They render one vulnerable. They give others power.”
“Or they give you something worth defending that is not merely survival.” She held his gaze. “There is strength in that as well.”
He studied her for a long moment, then lifted her hands to his lips and kissed each palm in turn, slowly, deliberately. “You almost make me believe that.”
“Give me time,” she said softly. “I shall make you certain of it.”
“Twenty-six days?”