Chapter 22
Edward pulled Valeria closer, his hand tightening on her waist. They were dancing again. She was still frozen.
“How did you know?” she whispered. “That someone was going to…”
“Hound,” he murmured.
“Right.”
He touched her shoulders, and she flinched.
Not from fear, but from the note, the words.
His true self. She had thought she was learning what that meant.
The quiet voice, the steady hands, the man who painted flowers on a dead man’s portrait just to make her laugh.
But four days ago, he had left without an explanation, and tonight he punched a man in her ballroom and snatched a threat out of the air like it was nothing.
He felt the flinch. His hands came up, palms open.
“I just wanted to make sure ye’re all right,” he said. A bitter smile spread across his lips. “Are ye finally afraid of me?”
Valeria blinked and shook her head. “No. I mean, not really. But your friend doesn’t agree with our wedding. Why?”
Edward’s face shuttered. The wall came down behind his eyes. “Because I cared for him too much when I had the chance,” he said coldly.
Valeria was shocked. She opened her mouth to press further, but the look in his eyes stopped her. Not the anger, but the exhaustion. A man carrying something heavy for a very long time.
“I don’t wish to speak about it. We should finish our dance and go to bed.”
“You cannot say something like that and then refuse to explain it.”
“I can. I just did.”
“Edward.”
“Valeria.” His voice was flat. A door closing.
She recognized the sound. Gordon used to do that, too. Shut conversations down with a tone that said the discussion was over and she would not resume it.
But Edward’s eyes were not Gordon’s eyes. Gordon’s eyes went cold when he shut a door. Edward’s eyes went hot. As though the thing behind the door was burning and he was trying to keep her from getting singed.
She let it go. For now.
She glanced toward the south wall, where George had been standing. He was gone. She had not seen him leave. That bothered her more than the smile had.
She filed it away. Another detail to add to the catalog she was building of Edward’s world. The friends. The threats. The notes thrown in ballrooms. The men who disappeared from rooms. None of it was what she had expected when she planned an auction for her hand.
She had expected polite men with polite manners who would say polite things and leave her alone. Instead, she had gotten a spy who punched people in her ballroom, a villain who smiled without his eyes, and a ballroom full of candles, roses, and the best waltz she had ever danced.
They still danced. The waltz was slow. Edward’s hand remained on her waist. Her hand was on his shoulder. They moved together in the candlelight, and she tried not to think about the note or the punch or George’s flat eyes.
She tried not to think about the warmth of Edward’s body against hers. The way his thumb absently rubbed circles on her waist. The way his warm breath brushed her temple.
She failed at not thinking about any of it.
She thought about the fact that this was the first time a man held her while she danced and she did not want to pull away.
Gordon had taken her to one ball early in their marriage, before he stopped letting her leave the house.She had stood rigid in his arms while the music played, counting the seconds until it ended.
And when it did, she went to the retiring room and pressed her hands to the cold stone wall until her breathing steadied.
Edward’s hands were nothing like Gordon’s. He held her as though she might vanish if he let go, and he was not willing to risk it.
The waltz was ending. She could feel it in the shift of the music, the way the melody rose and thinned and prepared to release them.
But she did not want to be released. She wanted to stay in this waltz, with his hand on her waist, his body warm against hers, and the ballroom turning around them like a music box.
She wanted to freeze the moment. Keep it in glass. Hold it up to the light and examine it from every angle so she could understand how a man who punched people in her ballroom and caught threats out of the air could also hold her with such devastating gentleness that she forgot how to breathe.
She thought about the note. His true self. She had spent three years living with a man whose true self was cruelty dressed in silk. She had learned to read the difference between the surface and the thing beneath it, the way a sailor read the difference between calm water and a riptide.
Edward’s surface was hard. Stone and silence and the flat, watchful eyes of a man who had been trained to show nothing. But beneath it, in the drawing room, on the carpet, in the gazebo, in the moments when he forgot to be the Hound, there was something so tender it made her teeth ache.
A man who built towers out of blocks with orphan boys. A man who painted flowers on the face of the man who had hurt her. A man who put bread on her plate before he served himself because the idea of her going hungry was intolerable to him.
That was his true self. Not the fists. Not the violence. But the bread. The flowers. The paint on his jaw and the look in his eyes when he said her name.
The note did not know that. Could not know it. Because one had to stand close enough to see it, and George Turner had never stood close enough to anyone to see anything except what he could use.
The waltz ended. Edward stepped back and held out his arm.
“I will take ye to yer room.”
They walked up the stairs. The corridor was quiet. At her door, she stopped.
“Join me,” she demanded. “Please.”
He looked at her. She could see him considering. The spy who counted exits.
“I need to ask you something,” she added, “and I need you to answer me honestly.”
“Ask.”
“Why did you just disappear? Four days. How could you vanish? If you regret–”
He kissed her. Quick. Hard. His hand sliding up her neck. Two seconds that burned through her chest. Then he let go.
“I don’t understand you, Duke,” she whispered.
He stroked her cheek. His thumb traced the line of her jaw, slow and gentle, and the tenderness after the violence of the evening made her eyes sting.
“Don’t try to,” he said. “Go to bed, Duchess.”
She did not want to go to bed. She wanted to stand in this corridor, with his hand on her face and his eyes on hers, until the candles burned down and the sun came up and the world made sense again.
She wanted to ask him about the note and the punch and George and the four days he had spent in London doing things he would not tell her about.
She wanted to ask him why he had kissed her and then pulled away, why he had touched her and then disappeared, why he kept coming close and then retreating like the tide.
But she had learned that pushing a man who was not ready to speak only made him quieter. The questions could wait. She would ask them tomorrow. Or the day after. Or on their wedding day, standing at the altar, if that was what it took.
“You can tell me things without worrying that I will use them against you,” she said quietly.
Something crossed his face fast. Gone before she could name it.
“I know I can,” he sighed. “That is the problem.”
“How is that a problem?”
“Because I have spent twelve years not caring what anyone thought of me. It made my work easier. It made everything easier.” He paused. “But I care what ye think. And that is terrifying.”
She stared at him. He looked away. The wall came back up, but slower this time. Reluctant.
“Will you be here in the morning?”
He looked at her. The corridor was dark. They were standing two inches apart.
“I promise,” he said.
She nodded and went inside. Closed the door. Leaned against it.
She heard him on the other side. He did not walk away. She pressed her hand flat against the oak.
She could hear his breathing. Steady but quick. The breathing of a man who was standing in a dark corridor on the wrong side of a door, trying to decide whether to walk away or break it down.
She pressed her forehead against the wood. It was cool against her skin. She imagined his face on the other side. His tight jaw. His green eyes. The scar on his neck that she wanted to trace with her fingers until he told her the story of how he got it.
She heard his hand on the wood. A soft sound. Palm flat against the oak, same as hers. Inches apart. A door between them.
Then his footsteps. Not walking away, but walking to the end of the corridor and back. Pacing. The steady, measured steps of a man who was fighting with himself.
She listened to him pace for two full minutes before his footsteps stopped. Then the door handle turned, and he came in.
She did not look at him. She went behind the screen in the corner and changed into her shift. When she came back out, he was sitting in the chair by the fire.
She climbed into bed. Left the candle burning. She kept her eyes closed. He was watching her. Making sure she was covered. Safe.
She could hear him shift in the chair. The small sounds of a large man trying to be quiet. The leather creaking under his weight. His coat brushing against the armrest. The sound of his boots being pulled off, one and then the other, set carefully on the floor.
He was staying. He was not leaving. He was sitting in a chair in her bedroom, on a night when he could have gone back to his own room, locked the door, and put the wall back up and become the Hound again.
Instead, he was here. Watching her breathe.
And that, she thought, was a kind of bravery that had nothing to do with pistols.
She lay still. She could feel him watching her the way one felt sunlight through a window, warm and steady and constant.
He was not looking at her the way Gordon looked at her—with assessment and calculation.
He was looking at her the way a man looked at something he had been given and was afraid to hold too tightly.
She wanted to tell him that she was not fragile.
That she had survived three years of Gordon Hansley and she was not going to break because a man with scarred knuckles sat in a chair to watch her sleep.
She wanted to tell him that the watching was not frightening.
It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in years.
But she did not say any of it. She lay still and let him watch. The silence between them was not empty. It was full. Full of all the things neither of them was ready to say.
She drifted, halfway between sleep and wakefulness.
“Thank you for coming back,” she murmured.
A long pause. The fire crackled.
“I will always come back,” he said, so quietly she was not sure she heard it.
She did not know if it was a promise or a prayer. It sounded like both. The voice of a man who had made promises before, in darker rooms, for darker purposes, and who was now trying to make one that meant something different. Something clean.
She wanted to tell him that coming back was not enough. That she needed him to stay. That the difference between coming back and staying was the distance between survival and living, and she had done enough surviving for a lifetime.
But the words were too heavy for the dark and the quiet and the sound of his breathing. She would say them tomorrow. Or the day after. Or on their wedding day. She would find the moment, and she would say them while meaning every syllable.
She felt him adjust her blanket. Pull it higher over her shoulders. His fingers brushed her collarbone and lingered there for a moment, light as a moth, and then withdrew. She heard the creak of the chair as he settled. The quiet rhythm of his breathing. The fire crackling in the grate.
She thought, in the space between waking and sleep, that this was what safety felt like. Not the absence of danger, but the presence of someone who stood between her and the dark.
He thinks he does not deserve me. He is wrong. But he is not ready to hear that yet.
She slept. The last thing she saw before her eyes closed was Edward settling into the chair by the fire, watching her with an expression she could not quite read.
Something careful. Something quiet. Something that looked, if she had been awake long enough to name it, like a man making a promise he was not sure he could keep.