Chapter 30
“There he is. London’s prodigal duke, returned at last to civilisation.”
Waverly’s voice carried across the card table with the booming goodwill of a man three brandies past discretion.
Alastair paused in the doorway of the smoking room, surveying the scene before him—the low-hanging haze of cigar smoke, the amber glow of oil lamps on polished mahogany, the familiar chorus of chips clinking and glasses refilling and men laughing at jokes they’d told each other a hundred times before.
He knew this room. Knew every crack in the leather armchairs, every stain on the carpet beneath the faro table, every face that turned toward him now with varying degrees of welcome.
He had spent the better part of a decade in rooms precisely like this one, performing precisely the version of himself that these rooms required.
Tonight, it all felt like putting on a coat that no longer fit.
“Waverly.” He crossed the threshold and accepted the brandy that appeared in his hand before he’d asked for it. The staff at the club remembered his habits. How reassuring. “I see you’ve managed to lose your fortune without me. I’m almost touched you saved any for my return.”
“Lost nothing. Won twelve pounds off Brightmore before supper.” Waverly pulled a chair out with his boot. “Sit. Play. You look as though you haven’t seen a deck of cards since the Dark Ages.”
Alastair sat. The chair was the same one he’d occupied on countless evenings—second from the end, angled toward the window so he could watch the room without appearing to.
His body remembered the posture, the careless slouch, the way to hold a glass so the candlelight caught the crystal just so.
Muscle memory. The body going through motions the mind had abandoned.
Brightmore dealt without ceremony. Alastair picked up his cards, arranged them with practised efficiency, and discovered that he did not care what they said.
“So.” Waverly leaned back, studying him with the blunt appraisal of long acquaintance. “The country air didn’t agree with you, then? You look—”
“Dashing? Irresistible? Dangerously well-rested?”
“Like you haven’t slept in a fortnight.”
Alastair’s mouth arranged itself into the grin he’d worn like armour since he was twenty-two. “Sleep is for men without imagination.”
He raised. Brightmore folded. Waverly called.
The game continued, and Alastair let the familiar rhythm of bet and counter-bet carry him through the next hour whilst the room filled and emptied around them in the usual tidal pattern of London’s social creatures—arriving in packs, breaking apart, re-forming around new gossip and old grievances.
He should have felt at home. This was his kingdom, after all. His terrain. The smoky, candlelit universe where Alastair Reed, Duke of Blackmere, reigned with the easy confidence of a man who wanted nothing and therefore could not be disappointed.
Instead, every sound grated. The scrape of chairs.
The forced laughter from the corner where Lord Ashworth was telling the same hunting story he’d been polishing since Michaelmas.
The clink of crystal that had once sounded like celebration and now sounded like—what?
Noise. Purposeless noise, filling the space where silence would have been unbearable.
He won three hands in succession without pleasure.
Waverly commented on his luck. Brightmore grumbled about loaded dice.
A passing acquaintance—Lord Hatherley, whose name Alastair recalled only because the man owed him forty guineas from a bet placed in the spring—clapped him on the shoulder and declared it was capital to have him back in town.
Capital. Yes. Everything was capital.
The days that followed were worse.
He attended a dinner he could not taste, a comedy at Drury Lane he walked out of at the interval, a succession of evenings so interchangeable they ceased to exist as separate events and became instead a single, endless attempt of a man trying to wedge himself back into a life that had been emptied of its only purpose.
His townhouse was intolerable—four walls and silence thick enough to choke on, the ghost of ink stains on his desk from letters he had written and not sent, each one beginning Penelope and ending in the wastepaper basket because he could not find words adequate to the catastrophe of his own making.
He went back to the club because there was nowhere else to go.
Waverly was there. Brightmore too. And Lord Cavanagh, who had married young and lost his wife to fever two years ago and now drank with the steady, professional dedication of a man anaesthetising himself against memory.
Alastair sat. Accepted cards. Played a hand. Then another. Won one, lost one, won again—the results indistinguishable from each other, all of them meaningless, all of them filling the minutes that stretched interminably between this moment and whatever came next.
“Must say,” Waverly announced, shuffling with the sloppy grandeur of a man well into his cups, “never thought I’d see the day our resident reprobate went domestic. How long did it last? A month? Two?”
Brightmore snorted into his whisky. “Generous. I gave it three weeks before he’d be back at the tables boring us with his winning streak.”
“I believe,” Waverly continued, warming to his subject, “the precise wager was—what did you say, Brightmore? That the great Duke of Blackmere would tire of playing house before the summer turned?”
Brightmore raised his glass in mock salute. “And here he sits, gentlemen. Right on schedule. Marriage thoroughly survived. Temporary insanity concluded. Normal service restored.”
Laughter rippled around the table. Cavanagh did not laugh. He watched Alastair over the rim of his glass with the flat, knowing gaze of a man who recognised the landscape of loss because he had walked it himself.
Alastair’s hand stilled on the cards.
Temporary insanity.
Normal service restored.
The words should have amused him. Should have slid off like everything else—another quip, another joke at his expense, another chapter in the ongoing comedy of the Rake Who Couldn’t Be Tamed.
He had survived a decade of such remarks.
Had cultivated them, for God’s sake. Had built his entire identity around being the man who could not be touched, could not be changed, could not be brought to heel by something as pedestrian as love.
But the word temporary lodged in his skull and would not shift.
Because that was what he’d told her, wasn’t it?
Or close enough. It was never meant to be anything else.
He had said those words—to Crawford, in his study, in a voice designed to sound controlled and reasonable—whilst the woman who had rebuilt his entire life from the foundations was somewhere in the house, packing her trunk.
Temporary. The midnight hours hovering outside the nursery door, listening for the catch in Rose’s breathing.
The morning Penelope had stood in his study and told him, with a calm that was more terrifying than anger, that she would go to the Whitcombe estate herself—that she would risk everything to protect a friend who had trusted her.
The afternoon on the hilltop, when she had laughed with her hair unpinned and her composure abandoned and her whole face open in a way he had never seen before and never since—the single most miserable moment of his entire wretched life.
He set the cards down.
“Reed?” Waverly frowned. “Your play.”
“I fold.”
“You fold? You’ve got a winning—”
“I fold.” He stood. The chair scraped. Brightmore exchanged a glance with Waverly—the silent, bewildered communication of men who sensed something had shifted in the room but lacked the vocabulary to name it.
Cavanagh said nothing. Merely inclined his head—the smallest gesture, barely perceptible—and the recognition in it nearly broke Alastair open where he stood.
Go, that nod said. Before it’s too late. Before you become me.
The night was cold. His boots struck the pavement with a rhythm that accelerated without his permission, carrying him down St. James’s and across Piccadilly, weaving between carriages and pedestrians and the general, teeming chaos of a London evening that no longer had anything to do with him.
He was not going home.
He was going home.
The distinction cracked through him like a fracture line through ice—sudden, clean, irreversible.
Home was not a townhouse on Grosvenor Square.
Was not an estate in the countryside with its rolling hills and immaculate gardens.
Home was a woman who argued with him about linen, who rolled her eyes at his compliments, who had once held a sick baby for nine straight hours without complaint and then wept into her pillow when she thought no one could hear.
Home was Penelope, and he had let her walk out of it because he was a coward and a fool and so spectacularly, comprehensively afraid of wanting something that could be taken from him that he had handed it over himself.
His carriage was not waiting. He hadn’t brought one. He hailed a hackney from the corner of Albemarle Street—the Duke of Blackmere, standing on a street corner in the dark, flagging down a hired cab like a common clerk too late for an appointment. The driver stared. Alastair didn’t care.
“Curzon Street,” he said. “Blackmere House. And if you can get me there in under ten minutes, I’ll pay you enough to retire to the coast.”
The driver whipped the horses forward without further discussion.
Alastair sat back against the cracked leather seat and pressed his knuckles to his mouth. His pulse hammered—not in his wrists or his temples but everywhere, his entire body conducting a single, insistent rhythm that said hurry, hurry, hurry, you have wasted so much time already.
He did not know what he would say. Had no speech prepared, no charming phrases marshalled, no strategy for what came next.
He, who had never in his life entered a room without a plan for how to make it love him, was hurtling through the London night toward the only person whose opinion had ever truly mattered—armed with nothing but the truth and the desperate, bone-deep terror that it might not be enough.
The carriage turned onto Curzon Street. Through the rain-streaked window, the lights of Blackmere House flickered into view—warm and golden against the wet dark.
She was inside. He knew it with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic.
The carriage stopped. He stepped down. Paid the driver without counting the coins. Stood on his own front steps in the drizzle, hair plastered to his forehead, evening clothes dampened past salvage, and pressed his hand flat against the door.
Behind it, somewhere in the lamplit rooms of a house he owned but she had made worth entering, Penelope was either going to forgive him or destroy him.
He suspected it would be both.
He opened the door.