Chapter 31
TWO MONTHS LATER
Seated at Benjamin Hadleigh’s table—Cassian’s old friend and the Earl of Somerton, now Emma’s new husband—Cecilia sipped her champagne as she celebrated with the recently wedded couple.
They had just returned from their two-week honeymoon in Bath and had invited her, Rosie, and a few more of their friends, including Cecilia’s new bosom-friend Prudence, for a small celebratory dinner at their home.
“Are you all right, Cecilia?” Rosie asked, who was ready to sail off into spinsterhood with aplomb. “You haven’t touched your salmon.”
“I’m fine,” Cecilia assured her friend, watching the diamond on her finger catch the gaslight—the ring Cassian had given her nearly three months ago now.
“Are you sure?” Rosie asked. “I know how the last few weeks have been trying on you.”
“My appetite comes and goes at times, and as for the last couple of months—I’d say they were tense, not utterly trying,” Cecilia replied.
“I’ve got a little distraction with renovating the outbuilding at Fitzroy Manor and turning it into a small library for the village orphans.
And when Ophelia Hawthorne turned up at my door, bawling her eyes out that Gabriel had abandoned her, too, in favor of Juliette Attenborough, this season’s diamond. ”
Rosie hmphed. “And you took her in. You are a saint, Cecilia.”
“She is only a product of Gabriel’s hubris,” Cecilia sighed. “I had tea with her. She apologized for her nasty comments, telling me all the lies Gabriel had spewed to her about me. We put it all under the bridge, and now she is better with him in her past.”
“I am disgusted that a man can still go on to court women with that ghost lingering over him,” Prudence murmured from the side beneath her glass of champagne. “We all know he has a child out of wedlock, but women overlook it for the chance of marrying a duke…”
“Welcome to a woman’s world,” Rosie shuddered visibly.
“Aw,” someone cooed as Ben kissed Emma on the cheek.
“That’s so sweet,” Pru tilted her head like a kitten.
“I am happy for Emma,” Rosie said wistfully. “She has wanted such a relationship for so long.”
“As am I,” Cecilia smiled.
“…Have you heard from him yet?” Rosie asked quietly.
Taking a sip of smooth champagne, Cecilia said, “No. But I like to believe he knows my heart as well as I know his by now. I asked him to come back to me. I know he will.”
“That’s hopeful, I suppose,” Rosie sighed. “I still cannot believe you ripped up the annulment agreement. I never thought you would defend Tressingham, much less fall in love with him.”
“Lord Byron said it best, for truth is always strange, stranger than fiction, if it could be told,” Cecilia smiled softly.
“And speaking of fictions, I’m afraid I must leave early this evening.
The orphanage is taking a trip tomorrow morning, and I still have a few small things to finish at the library before they arrive. ”
“Tonight?” Emma looked disappointed. “But we’ve only just sat down.”
“I know, I know, and I’ll make it up to you all next week,” Cecilia said, rising from her seat. “But I promised the children everything would be ready, and I couldn’t bear to disappoint their tiny faces.”
“I’ll go too,” Prudence quickly added. She had been coming by to help whenever Cecilia needed an extra pair of hands with the shelving and sorting.
Rosie squeezed her hand. “You are a good woman, Cece. Go tend to your library.”
It was early the next morning. The lending library smelled of beeswax and musty pages, and if Cecilia stood very still near the old desk, she could almost convince herself she caught the faintest trace of sandalwood.
Almost.
She’d spent the better part of eight weeks transforming the once derelict outbuilding, lining its walls with books from the manor’s collection for the village to borrow.
It gave her something to do with her hands, her time, her thoughts.
Anything to keep from dwelling on the hollowness that had taken up residence in her chest.
His things remained exactly where he’d left them. The writing desk with its carved initials. The blackboard he’d teased her with in the corner. Stacks of childhood drawings she couldn’t bring herself to move. Sometimes she sat in his old chair and pretended she could still feel his presence.
Thunder growled overhead.
Prudence looked up from sorting primers, her eyes flickering to the window. “Oh dear. The weather is turning rather quickly.”
Cecilia followed her gaze to where dark clouds had gathered like bruises across the sky. Rain began to tap against the glass, tentative at first, then insistent. “Gadz. The orphans won’t come in this.”
The bell above the door chimed. Lord Rothbury ducked inside, already damp. When his gaze found Prudence, his expression softened in a way that made Cecilia’s chest ache.
Crossing to them, he said, “Forgive the intrusion, Your Grace, but Lady Prudence and I ought to leave now if we are to beat the worst of the weather.”
Prudence gathered her things with apologetic glances at Cecilia. “Will you be all right? I can stay if—”
“I’m fine,” Cecilia assured her, mustering her best smile. “Go, before you’re both drenched and give our sleepy town something to talk about for the next month.”
The moment the door closed behind them, the smile fell away. Rain drummed harder against the roof now, a steady percussion that matched the dull ache behind her ribs. She should close early. Return to the manor. But the thought of those empty rooms, that empty bed...
A sound came from behind her. The softest creak of floorboards. Then the bell.
She turned, but the library was empty. Her gaze fell to the desk, and her breath stopped.
A book sat there. One that absolutely had not been there moments ago.
With trembling hands, she crossed to it. The water stain on the lower corner. The loose thread on the binding. Her heart kicked against her ribs.
It was her copy of Cecilia. The very one that had gone missing the night Cassian left.
She opened it with shaking fingers. There were her annotations, scattered throughout in her familiar hand.
All her caustic remarks about love and loneliness and impossible men.
But beneath them, woven between her words like a conversation across time, fresh blue ink formed responses she’d never seen.
Near the beginning, she found the passage about solitude. Her bitter notation beneath it: If solitude’s appeal fades, I can only assume it is because one has not yet met the Duke of Tressingham.
Below that, in handwriting that made her heart seize: It is not the solitude that terrifies me, sweetheart. It is the absence of you.
She turned more pages, found more annotations in blue ink, and found another passage near the end about courage and second chances.
And his reply: I was a coward. Until I met someone. I’m sorry to her that I didn’t know how to stay. If only there were any part of her that could forgive a coward.
The book slipped from her hands.
For a heartbeat, she stood frozen. Then she was moving, running, crashing through the outside door and into the downpour.
Rain lashed her like a physical force, instantly soaking through her dress. She blinked water from her eyes and saw someone—a distant figure walking away down the path, head bowed against the storm.
“Wait!” The word tore from her throat.
He stopped. Didn’t turn. Just stood there in the rain, utterly still.
Cecilia ran, her slippers sliding in the mud, her skirts heavy and clinging. When she got close enough to see him properly, everything in her chest compressed.
“Cassian?” she gasped in the freezing rain. “Is it… is it really you?”
He was… leaner than she remembered. His dark hair plastered to his nape, rain streaming down his coat. He looked hollowed out, exhausted. Like a man who’d been searching for something he was terrified he’d never find. He still hadn’t turned around.
Rain poured between them. She tried to speak again, but her throat was too tight, her heart beating too hard.
Finally, she managed, “Are you leaving again?”
Silence. Just rain and wind and the thundering of her pulse.
Her voice came out broken, “Answer me one thing before you go. The letter you left... Did you mean it?”
At last, he turned.
His eyes found hers, and the naked desperation in them stole whatever was left of her anguished soul. “Every word.”
“Then—then why are you walking away?”
For a long moment, he said nothing. When his lips finally parted, his voice came out rough and low, “Because I don’t know if I have the right to be here. To ask what I came to ask.”
“Which is?”
He made to take a step toward her, then physically stopped himself. “Clemency. I… left you. I told myself I was setting you free, that you’d be better off, but the truth is, I was a coward. I was terrified of failing you. Terrified of being abandoned.”
“So you abandoned me instead,” she said quietly.
He flinched. “Yes.”
“Where did you go?”
“Everywhere and nowhere.” His hands curled at his sides.
“I don’t know. I kept thinking if I walked far enough, saw enough, it would fill the emptiness I had left behind.
But everywhere I went, all I could think was that it meant nothing.
That I was having experiences that were empty. How they meant nothing without you.”
Rain dripped from his raven hair, down his high cheeks and his sharp jaw.
He looked utterly destroyed. “I carried your book with me through it all. Read your annotations until I had them memorized as if you were speaking them to me. Wrote responses even though I thought you’d never see them.
Pretended I could still hear you with me, still.
..” His voice cracked. “God, Cecilia. I missed you so much I couldn’t breathe. ”
Something in her chest burst open. “When—when did you find out I didn’t sign it? The annulment?”
“Five weeks ago. Somerton’s letter found me.”
“Five weeks,” she whispered back, her throat trembling. “You knew for five weeks?”