Chapter Nineteen
Christian had been sober for twelve days.
It was not a long stretch of sobriety, all things considered—barely a fortnight—but it felt like an eternity.
Every evening, the brandy decanter called to him from its place on the sideboard, promising oblivion, promising relief from the constant ache of missing her.
Every evening, he turned away from it and went to bed with nothing but his thoughts for company.
The thoughts were not pleasant companions.
But he was trying. That was what mattered.
He was eating regularly, sleeping occasionally, and attending to the estate matters that had piled up during his weeks of dissolution.
He had shaved his beard—though he kept his hair long, as she had liked it—and dressed in clean clothes each morning.
He was, by all outward appearances, a man who had pulled himself back from the brink.
Inwardly, he was still falling.
He thought about her constantly. Fiona, with her sharp tongue and soft heart, her grey eyes and copper-touched hair.
Fiona, who had looked at his birthmark and called it beautiful.
Fiona, who had loved him despite everything—despite his walls, his fears, his seemingly infinite capacity for self-destruction.
He had let her go. He had pushed her away, convinced himself it was the noble thing to do, and watched her carriage disappear with his heart breaking in his chest.
And now he was meant to… what?
Carry on as though nothing had happened? Return to the quiet routines of Thornwick and pretend that the weeks they had shared were some brief enchantment from which he had now awakened?
He could not. The thought itself was intolerable.
He did not want a life without her.
He wanted Fiona.
He wanted her laughter in the halls, her quick temper and sharper wit, the way she looked at him as though the birthmark he had been taught to despise was nothing more than another part of the man she loved.
He wanted the future they had imagined together—wildflowers in the chapel ruins, children racing through the gardens, her voice calling his name across the wind-swept cliffs.
He wanted all of it.
And he knew, with a clarity that left no room for doubt, that the only way to have it was to go to her.
Every morning, he woke with the same resolve.
Today, he would do it. He would order the carriage, ride to London, discover where she was staying, and beg her forgiveness. He would kneel before her if necessary—before all of society, if it came to that—and declare his love in terms that could not be mistaken.
Every morning, he believed himself ready.
And every day, something held him back.
Fear, mostly. The old, familiar terror that had ruled his life for eight-and-twenty years.
What if she had already begun to forget him?
What if the weeks apart had given her the distance to see clearly what he had always believed—that she deserved better than him?
What if he arrived in London only to find her walking in Hyde Park on the arm of some handsome, untroubled gentleman—someone without scars, without shadows, without the long history of pain that seemed to cling to Christian Hale wherever he went?
The thought hollowed him out.
So, he stayed at Thornwick. He ate his meals and attended his duties and told himself that he was preparing, gathering his strength, working up to the grand gesture that would win her back.
But deep down, he knew the truth.
He was still hiding. Still running. Still letting fear make his decisions for him.
And he hated himself for it.
The letter arrived on a grey Tuesday morning, delivered with the rest of the post on a silver salver.
Christian almost did not open it. The handwriting was unfamiliar—feminine, elegant, clearly educated—and he assumed it was another piece of society correspondence, some invitation to an event he would never attend from a hostess who was either very brave or very foolish to extend it.
But something made him break the seal anyway. Curiosity, perhaps. Or the vague, irrational hope that it might somehow be connected to Fiona.
He unfolded the letter and began to read.