Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You kissed her?”
Nathaniel’s question carried such delighted disbelief that Benedict immediately regretted saying anything.
He stood behind the desk in his study, one hand resting on a stack of correspondence he had been pretending to examine for the better part of an hour.
Morning rain left the windows misted at the edges, though the clouds had begun to thin and pale sunlight now lay across the carpet in long, watery strips.
Nathaniel was perched opposite him, with one ankle resting comfortably upon the other knee, looking as though Christmas had arrived unexpectedly in August.
Nathaniel leaned forward. “You kissed your wife?”
Benedict’s frown deepened. “Who else would I be referring to?”
Nathaniel grinned. “I merely wished to establish the full enormity of the scandal.”
“There is no scandal.”
“A duke kissing his duchess beneath his own roof?” Nathaniel shook his head gravely. “Civilization trembles.”
Benedict picked up the nearest letter. He had no idea what it concerned… something about drainage or sheep, possibly both.
“You are enjoying this far too much.”
“I have waited years to enjoy something this much,” Nathaniel admitted. “And by this, I mean watching you discover that you are, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, a man.”
Benedict lowered the letter.
Nathaniel smiled. It was the smile he had worn at seventeen after convincing three prefects that Benedict had voluntarily agreed to participate in a midnight rowing race. Benedict had not agreed. He had nevertheless ended up in the boat.
“Was it dreadful?” Nathaniel asked.
Benedict stared at him.
“The kiss,” Nathaniel clarified. “Perhaps that explains your present expression. Did you collide noses? Step upon her foot? Deliver a lecture on proper technique halfway through?”
“Nathaniel.”
“Did you count?”
Benedict’s jaw tightened.
Nathaniel’s eyes widened. “Good God. You did not count.”
“I did not count.”
“Thank heaven. There may yet be hope for you.”
“There is nothing requiring hope.”
“You kissed a woman without first determining the appropriate procedure. I consider it a remarkable advance.”
Benedict pushed the letter aside.
Nathaniel’s grin widened. “Who began it?”
Benedict’s eyes narrowed. “That is none of your concern.”
“You, then.”
“I did not say that.”
“You did not need to.”
Benedict turned toward the window. That was a mistake.
The glass reflected little of the room, but his mind supplied another image with merciless clarity: moonlight upon Sophia’s face and the faint warmth of her cheek beneath his palm.
His body remembered what his mind had spent the entire morning trying to contain.
Nathaniel’s voice came from behind him. “You are thinking about it.”
“No.”
“You have been staring at a rain barrel for nearly half a minute.”
Benedict looked down. There was, indeed, a rain barrel beneath the window.
“I am thinking.”
“Yes,” Nathaniel teased. “About kissing your wife.”
Benedict turned sharply. “Must every thought I possess become entertainment for you?”
Nathaniel’s smile remained, but something in it altered.
“No,” he replied. “Only the interesting ones.”
Benedict glanced toward the chair near the window and remembered Sophia occupying it several mornings earlier while searching through a book on wildflowers. She complained that his study possessed too many dark colors and not enough comfortable cushions.
Benedict informed her that studies were not intended to be comfortable. She looked around the room and replied that this explained a great deal about him.
He thought of the remark twice since. Three times. Possibly more.
Benedict moved around the desk and poured himself water rather than brandy. Nathaniel watched him.
“It should not have happened,” Benedict said.
The amusement disappeared from Nathaniel’s face. “Ah.”
Benedict drank. The water was cool and entirely useless.
Nathaniel lowered his foot to the carpet. “You regret it?”
“No.” The answer came too quickly.
Benedict closed his eyes for one brief moment.
“That,” he explained quietly, “is rather the difficulty.”
Nathaniel did not laugh this time. Benedict set the glass down. He wished, absurdly, that Nathaniel would make another foolish remark, something about noses, counting, or the collapse of civilization. Benedict knew how to defend himself against mockery. Concern was far more dangerous.
Nathaniel leaned back slowly. “Tell me.”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“You kissed her and spent the next morning hiding in your study.”
“I am not hiding.” Benedict rubbed one hand slowly across his jaw.
Nathaniel watched him for another moment. “I take it this is not about the kiss.”
Benedict’s hand stilled.
“No,” he admitted. “The marriage had terms.”
Nathaniel said nothing.
“It was an arrangement. We both understood that.”
“Yes.”
“Sophia wished it to remain a marriage in name only.”
“I remember.”
“And I agreed.”
Nathaniel’s expression had gone completely still.
Benedict stared into the fire. The flames moved over the coal in low orange folds, consuming it carefully, steadily, without haste.
He understood such things. Fire required boundaries, a grate, stone, and distance from anything that might catch fire.
Without them, warmth became destruction.
“Feelings were never supposed to become part of the arrangement,” he echoed.
Nathaniel’s brow tightened faintly.
“That was the rule.”
“Was it?”
Benedict looked at him.
Nathaniel lifted one hand. “I am not disputing what you agreed. I merely do not recall either of you signing a declaration promising never to feel anything.”
Benedict frowned. “You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“Then do not deliberately misunderstand me.”
“I am trying not to.”
Benedict turned away again. The trouble was that the room contained too many reminders of her now. There was a volume Sophia left upon the side table two days earlier, with a small sprig of lavender pressed between its pages because Amelia insisted they preserve it.
Benedict noticed it because he noticed everything belonging to her. That was another problem, these small things. She altered rooms through accumulation.
Perhaps she altered him in precisely the same way, not dramatically, not all at once, with a laugh here, a disagreement there, her hand on his sleeve, her voice in the nursery, her books beside his papers.
Her warmth threaded quietly through the structure of his days until he could no longer tell where duty ended and wanting began.
“I knew what I was offering her,” Benedict sighed. “Security. A home. The girls. A position she could make her own.”
Nathaniel watched him carefully. “And what were you offering yourself?”
Benedict gave a humorless laugh. “Nothing.”
“That seems unlike you. You generally negotiate better.”
“This was never about me.”
Nathaniel pointed a knowing finger. “That does sound like you.”
Benedict’s thought of Sophia saying good night in the garden. The desire itself was manageable. Benedict was not a boy. Physical attraction could be governed. He understood appetite. He understood restraint.
It was everything surrounding it that frightened him.
It was the tenderness, the ease, the almost unbearable awareness that she trusted him enough to lean closer rather than away, and finally, the terrifying little thought that entered him as Sophia sat beside him in the dark garden, that perhaps this could be his life…
not merely the girls, not merely Rivermere.
Her.
He imagined permanence without realizing he had done so. And permanence was a dangerous thing to desire.
Nathaniel rose. The leather chair gave a soft creak as it released his weight.
“When we were twenty,” he said, “you once told me you would never marry unless there were an excellent practical reason.”
“I remember.”
“I told you that was the least romantic declaration any man had made since Henry VIII.”
Benedict gave him a warning look, but Nathaniel did not smile.
“You have spent years arranging your life so that nothing can surprise you,” Nathaniel continued. “The estate. The girls. Your obligations. Even grief, when it came, was given a place to stand.”
Benedict stiffened. Nathaniel saw it.
His voice softened. “I am not mocking you.”
“I know.”
That made it worse. Benedict looked toward the windows. Beyond them, the lawn shone wet beneath the newly emerging sun. A breeze stirred the upper branches of the old elm, shaking droplets loose from the leaves. They fell in brief silver flashes.
He buried too many people. Each loss taught him the same lesson in a different voice: nothing beloved remained merely because one needed it to.
Love never proved itself gentle merely because people spoke of it as though it were. Love was exposure. It placed another living person somewhere inside oneself and then trusted the world not to tear them out.
Benedict learned the folly of that trust. He remembered standing beside his brother’s coffin, thinking that grief had to possess a limit because a man could surely not endure more than what he already felt.
Then he discovered that grief possessed no such courtesy.
There was always room for another loss. He survived by becoming useful where he could not be hopeful.
Rules.
Duty.
Protection.
Those things could be done. They could be measured, corrected, and repeated. Love could only be endured.
“I cannot do this again,” he said.
Nathaniel’s face changed. The words emerged more quietly than Benedict intended. Perhaps because they were not truly about Sophia, or not only about Sophia.
Nathaniel came closer but stopped several feet away. “Benedict.”
“I know what happens when people become necessary.”
The admission scraped something raw inside him.
Nathaniel did not offer some easy contradiction. He knew better. Instead, he said softly, “Sophia is already necessary to this house.”
Benedict swallowed. “That is precisely the problem.”
“To the girls.”
“Yes.”
“And perhaps to you.”
Benedict’s gaze hardened.
Nathaniel sighed. “There. That look. You may glower at me until the windows frost, but it will not alter anything.”
“I can alter my own conduct.”
Nathaniel became very still. Benedict heard his own conclusion forming before he wished to speak it. It was simple and practical, and painful enough to feel correct.
He allowed the boundaries to blur. He started seeking her out. He entered rooms and looked for her. He heard laughter in the corridor and listened for hers among it. He passed the library and wondered whether she was inside.
Such behavior was not control. It was surrender disguised as habit.
He behaved as though affection could be indulged without consequence. Last night proved otherwise. Sophia deserved certainty. The girls deserved stability. And Benedict needed to remember that Rivermere survived because he did not permit every impulse to become an action.
“I kissed her.” Benedict continued, more slowly. “And for several moments I forgot why I should stop.”
The confession altered the room. Even Nathaniel seemed to understand what it cost him.
Benedict looked at his own hand, the same one that rested against Sophia’s cheek. Resisting Sophia alone might have been possible. Resisting the hope she shared was something else entirely.
“I have lost control of my own household.”
Nathaniel frowned. “That is rather dramatic, even for you.”
“My rules are negotiated before breakfast. Marjorie has begun consulting Sophia as though she were legal counsel. There is a kitten sleeping in the west drawing room.”
Nathaniel chuckled. “Admiral is quite persuasive.”
“I found a wooden sword in my study yesterday. This house no longer feels as it did.”
Nathaniel studied him. “Is that truly something you wish to correct?”
Benedict looked around the study. He thought of Rivermere before Sophia, of quiet corridors, orderly rooms, meals conducted with excessive civility, two children trying very hard not to grieve too loudly, and himself, believing survival and happiness were the same thing because distinguishing between them demanded too much.
Then he thought of her laughter moving through the halls, of Amelia curled beside her with a book, of Marjorie dragging Sophia toward the garden by one hand while Sophia protested without making the slightest effort to escape, and of a house becoming warm.
The answer should have been simple. It was not. That was why he had to make it simple.
“I need to remember what this marriage is,” Benedict concluded.
Nathaniel’s expression became troubled. “And what do you intend to do?”
Benedict looked toward the door. Somewhere beyond it was Sophia, perhaps in the morning room with Amelia, perhaps in the garden arguing with Wilkes, perhaps laughing with Marjorie over some violation of household order that Benedict would discover only when it became impossible to reverse.
He felt the pull toward her even in absence. That decided him.
Distance could restore proportion. Distance could place the arrangement where it belonged.
He would be courteous and kind. He would fulfill every responsibility he had assumed when he married her.
Nothing would be withdrawn from Sophia, nothing except the dangerous intimacy he had foolishly begun to permit.
No searching for her in rooms. No unnecessary walks. No lingering beside her after the girls had gone to bed. No touching merely because he wanted to.
And certainly no more kisses.
His chest tightened at the thought.
Nathaniel watched him as though he could see every conclusion forming. “This will not be as simple as you imagine.”
“It does not need to be simple.”
“No?”
“No.”
Benedict looked again toward the door.
“It merely needs to be necessary.”
Nathaniel said nothing. For once, he seemed to have no joke waiting. Benedict was grateful for that.
“If I am to regain any control over my life,” he said slowly, “and over my home…”
He stopped. The silence stretched. A coal shifted in the grate behind him with a soft collapse. Nathaniel waited. Benedict’s chest tightened once, then discipline closed around the ache.
“I have to start keeping my distance from her.”