Chapter 30
The guests retired late. The candles burned down to stumps. Mrs. Grady cleared the table with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had been cleaning up after celebrations for thirty years and who would not stand for crumbs on her floor, wedding or no wedding.
Valeria went to her bedroom. Their bedroom, she supposed, though the thought sat strangely in her chest. The last time she had shared a bedroom with a man, the door locked from the outside.
She changed into her shift. The silk one. Caroline had packed it in her trousseau with a look that suggested she knew exactly what she was doing. Valeria had rolled her eyes at the time. Now, she smoothed the fabric over her hips and looked at herself in the mirror, feeling her stomach tighten.
The silk was thin. Ivory. It caught the firelight and turned translucent at the edges. She looked like a bride. She looked like a woman who was waiting for her husband to come to her bed.
The thought made her heart hammer against her ribs because the last time she had waited for her husband in a shift, she had been planning to lie her way out of consummation.
She was not planning to lie tonight. She was not planning anything tonight except the truth, which was that she wanted him.
She had wanted him since the gazebo, since the storm, since he had carried her through the rain and she felt his heartbeat against her ribs and understood, with a certainty that had terrified her, that this man was not a convenience.
She sat on the edge of the bed and waited.
The room was different tonight. Mary had changed the linens. White cotton, fresh and crisp, smelling of lavender and the particular care she took with things that mattered. There were flowers on the nightstand, white roses from the garden. A candle flickered on the mantelpiece.
Mary had prepared this room for a wedding night with the quiet efficiency of a woman who understood what it meant for Valeria to choose a bed instead of dreading one.
Valeria touched the roses. The petals were soft and cool to the touch.
She thought about the last time flowers had been placed in her bedroom for a man.
Lilies. Gordon’s choice. They smelled like funerals, and she had asked Mary to remove them.
Mary had done so without a word, and they had never appeared again.
These roses were different. These roses smelled like the garden where Edward had carried her through the rain. These roses smelled like a new beginning.
She pressed her fingers to the satin ribbon at the neckline of her shift. She had tied it once. Untied it. Tied it again.
She was being ridiculous. She was a grown woman. A duchess. She had survived three years of Gordon Hansley. She could survive a wedding night, even one that might not go the way she wanted.
The question was what she wanted. She had spent so long not wanting that the wanting itself felt dangerous. Like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down. The fall would be either exhilarating or catastrophic, and there was no way to know which until she jumped.
She heard his footsteps in the corridor. The fire crackled. The house settled around her, footsteps retreating, doors closing, the quiet that came after a celebration.
She opened the door before he could knock.
He was in his shirtsleeves. The coat was gone. The cravat was gone. His collar was open, showing the scar on his neck. His hair was pushed back, his eyes were tired, and his jaw was rough with a full day’s stubble.
He looked exhausted. He looked beautiful. He looked like a man who had been fighting all day and was not sure the fighting was over.
“I thought you’d want to talk,” she said, stepping aside.
He walked in and looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time.
The bed. The fire. The chair where he had sat so many nights, watching her sleep.
The silk shift she was wearing. His eyes caught on that.
Lingered. Then moved away, deliberately, the way a man moved away from a fire when he knew he was standing too close.
“Everything is all right,” he assured.
The words sounded rehearsed. A speech he had prepared on the walk from the great hall. Flat and careful and nothing like the man who had said love at the altar.
“Edward.”
“It is. The threat has been dealt with. Ye’re safe.”
She studied him. His rigid shoulders. His hands at his sides, fists clenched, knuckles still raw beneath the bandage. He was standing in the center of her bedroom on their wedding night, looking like a man bracing for a blow rather than a bridegroom.
“Now that we are married,” she said carefully, “I think we should revisit our terms.”
Something flickered across his face, but it was gone before she could name it. She saw his jaw tighten. Saw his hands twitch at his sides. Saw the war in his eyes between the man who wanted to cross the room and the man who believed he should not.
“I don’t.” His voice was rough. “I’m sorry.”
The words landed like a door closing.
She stood very still. The fire popped. The silk shift that Caroline had packed with such confidence suddenly felt foolish. Valeria had dressed for a wedding night, and he was giving her an apology.
He crossed the room, took her hand, and raised it to his lips. Pressed a kiss to her knuckles that was so gentle it made her eyes sting. Then he turned her hand over and kissed her palm. His mouth lingered there, warm against her skin.
She could feel the roughness of his jaw and the softness of his lips and the contradiction of him in that single gesture, the violence and the tenderness, always at war, always pulling in opposite directions, always leaving her breathless and confused and aching for more.
Then he released her hand. Kissed her cheek. The corner of her mouth. Close enough that she could feel his breath on her lips, close enough that if she turned her head even slightly, their mouths would meet, and the night would become what it was supposed to be.
She did not turn her head. She wanted him to choose it. She needed him to choose it.
“Goodnight, wife,” he whispered. She heard the ache in it.
And then he left. The door clicked shut behind him.
Valeria stood there with her hand still raised, her palm still warm, and the taste of almost on her lips. She pressed her fingers to her mouth. Closed her eyes.
He kissed my palm on our wedding night and then left. He left. Again.
She sat on the bed and pulled the ribbon at the neckline loose. There was no point in the silk now. She changed into the cotton shift Mary had laundered that morning, the one that was soft from years of washing and smelled of lavender and home.
She sat in the candlelight, feeling foolish, angry, and sad. She did not know which feeling deserved the most attention, so she gave them all equal weight and let them sit in her chest like a collection of stones.
She thought about the women she had met at Gordon’s dinners.
The wives who smiled too brightly and drank too much sherry and who told her, in whispered conversations in the retiring room, that marriage was a business arrangement, love was for novels, and the sooner she accepted that, the happier she would be.
She had not believed them then. She had thought they were wrong, or broken, or simply resigned to something she would never accept. She had held onto the belief that somewhere, somehow, there existed a man who would look at her and see a person rather than a possession.
Edward saw her. She knew that with a certainty that went beyond logic. He saw her in a way no one else had ever seen her. He saw the fire, the humor, the stubbornness, and the scars Gordon had left on the inside, where they did not show. He saw all of it and wanted her anyway.
She knew this because of the way he looked at her when he thought she was not watching. The way his eyes went soft. The way his breath hitched. The way his whole body leaned toward her, involuntary, as though she were a fire and he were cold.
He wanted her. And he had walked away. Because he was afraid. Not of her. But of himself. Of the thing George had told him he was. The weapon. The Hound. The man who could not be trusted with tender things, because tender things broke in his hands.
She wanted to shake him. She wanted to cross the corridor, bang on his door, and tell him that he was wrong, that George was a liar and a manipulator, that the man who let children put beetles in his pockets and who painted flowers on dead men’s portraits was not a weapon.
He was a man. A good man. A man who was so busy being afraid of what he might become that he could not see what he already was.
But she would not chase him. She had chased Gordon.
Not in the same way, not willingly, but she had spent three years trying to understand him, trying to please him, trying to find the version of him that might treat her with kindness.
She had chased a ghost. She had run herself ragged chasing a man who did not exist.
She would not do that again. Not even for Edward. Not even for the man she loved.
If he wanted her, he would have to come to her. He would have to walk through that door, put down his weapons, and be the man she knew he was.
She could not do it for him. No one could do it for him. This was his battle. The only one that mattered.
She blew out the candle and lay down in the dark, listening to the house settle. Somewhere across the corridor, she could hear him pacing. The steady, measured steps of a man who was fighting with himself.
She pulled the blanket over her shoulders and stared at the fire, trying to understand the man she had married. He was a code she could not crack. A labyrinth she could not navigate. Every time she thought she had found the center, the hedges shifted, the path turned, and she was lost again.
He had said he did not regret marrying her.
He had said it twice. He had said love in front of the vicar.
He had kissed her at the altar with a tenderness that made the entire chapel hold its breath.
And then he had sat through the feast with his jaw tight and his eyes distant, and he had come to her room and kissed her palm and said goodnight as though this were any other evening, not the night that was supposed to change everything.
She thought about Gordon. Their wedding night. The locked door. The cold room. The shift on the pillow she refused to touch. She had sat in her wedding dress and counted her breaths, ready to fight.
Hers and Edward’s wedding night was the opposite, and somehow it was just as lonely. Not because he was cruel, but because he was kind. Because his kindness came wrapped in distance, and the distance was killing her.
I will not chase after him again. I will not.
But even as she thought it, she knew it was a lie. She had been chasing him since the gazebo. He was not an arrangement.
He was the thing she had stopped believing existed. A man who saw her. Not her dowry, not her title, not the strategic advantage of her hand. But simply her.
The woman who painted flowers on dead men’s portraits, cheated at relay races, laughed with her whole body when she let herself, and who had spent three years learning how to survive and was only now, slowly, painfully, learning how to live.
The following morning, Edward took breakfast in his room.
Mary told her. Mary, who brought the tea and the toast and the information with the same brisk efficiency she brought everything.
“The Duke requested a tray in his chambers,” she said, setting down the cup. “He told the footman he had correspondence to attend to.”
“Correspondence.”
“That is what he said.”
“On the morning after his wedding.”
“I am merely reporting, Your Grace. I am not editorializing, though I can if you wish.”
“I do not wish.”
“Very well.” Mary set down the toast. “But I will say that if my husband took breakfast in his room on the morning after our wedding, I would have something to say about it. Several things. Loudly.”
“Mary.”
“I am merely making an observation.”
Valeria drank her tea. It tasted like nothing.
She thought about going to Edward’s room, knocking on his door, and demanding an explanation.
She thought about it for a long time, sitting at the breakfast table alone in the morning light, with the roses from yesterday still on the windowsill and the crumbs from the wedding cake still on the sideboard and the chair across from her empty.
She had wanted to help him. She had wanted to start a family. The thought had surprised her when it first came, somewhere between the masquerade and the night he held her hand while she slept.
A child. His child. She had spent three years convincing Gordon that she could not bear children, and now, for the first time, she wondered what it would feel like to carry one. To hold a boy with Edward’s green eyes. To raise a girl with his stubbornness and her mischief.
It was actually the first time she had wondered what it would be like to be a mother, to raise this man’s children.
The desire was so sharp it frightened her.
But she could not force him. She could not force his mind, his habits, his feelings. He had told her many times this was a marriage of convenience. She had been a fool to believe anything else.
If he wants to remain the Hound for the rest of his life, he can. But I will not be the one to chase after him again.
She stood, went to her bedroom, and packed a small bag. Two dresses. A shawl. Her sketchbook, though she could not draw. A book she would not read.
Mary appeared in the doorway. “Your Grace?”
“I am going to the orphanage. I need some time with the children.”
“You are leaving on the morning after your wedding.”
“He left first.” Valeria hated how small her voice sounded. She straightened her spine. “I need some space, Mary. I will not be gone long.”
Mary looked at her for a long moment. Then she folded a third dress into the bag without being asked and handed Valeria her cloak.
“Shall I tell the Duke where you have gone?”
“If he asks.”
“And if he does not ask?”
“Then I suppose we have our answer.”
Valeria left through the kitchen. Mrs. Grady pressed a bundle of bread and cheese into her hands, looking as though she wanted to say something but decided against it.
The carriage took her to the village. The orphanage was small, warm, and full of noise, and the children swarmed her the moment she walked through the door.
For the first time since the wedding, she felt like she could breathe.
Ruth was reading in the corner. William had grown two inches since she had last seen him. Thomas was chasing Horace, who was chasing a frog.
At least some things did not change. She wondered if her husband had noticed she was gone. She wondered if he cared.