Chapter 23 #2
Not visibly. She was not so foolish as to imagine walls would brighten because a man had kissed her, or that ordinary rooms would arrange themselves into proof of a future.
Yet some private part of her had believed the air would change between them.
That when Hector came near, the distance he had kept with such discipline would no longer be quite so wide.
That his voice might lower differently over her name.
That he might turn toward her not out of duty, but because he wanted to.
She had not expected happiness to arrive complete. She knew too much for that. But she had expected warmth.
Instead, when she saw him, he bowed, and his face gave nothing away.
“Duchess,” he said.
Not Poppy.
It struck her so softly that no one else would have heard the damage in it. Yet she did. She felt it with an immediacy that shamed her. One kiss, and she had become greedy enough to expect a change in him.
“Your Grace,” she answered.
His fingers shifted at the mention of his title. It was a small movement. If she had not learned to read him in fragments, she would have missed it. Once, such a movement would have pleased her. It would have suggested that he was not as untouched as he appeared.
Now it was not enough.
She looked at him because she could not help it. He seemed to have returned to himself; every open door was shut, and every window barred. The man who had kissed her, whose restraint had broken with a kind of reverent desperation, was nowhere in sight.
Had she imagined him?
No. Her lips remembered, and her whole body remembered the shock of being wanted by him with a need he had not managed to disguise. She had not misunderstood that. Whatever else might be uncertain, that had been real.
Which made this worse.
If the kiss had meant nothing, she could have blamed herself for foolishness and endured the humiliation.
But it had meant something. She knew it had.
She had felt it in the tremor that passed through him when he touched her, in the way he had stopped afterward as if the world had punished him for being alive.
Perhaps that was what she was seeing now. Not indifference. Punishment.
But her heart, tired of being asked to translate pain into virtue, did not know what to do with the distinction.
“I hope you are well,” he said.
The words were so courteous. They might have been spoken to a neighbor.
“I am,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You have everything you require?”
She knew what he was truly asking about.
Food, shelter, safety, and arrangements.
The measurable forms of care. He was generous with those. Unfailingly so. She had once found comfort in it, but now it felt like being handed a blanket when she was asking not to be left outside.
“Yes,” she said. “I have everything I require.”
His head inclined. “Good.”
Another long silence followed.
Poppy waited. Pride told her not to wait for more mundane questions, such as whether she had slept. Or for him to confess that he had not. She hoped that he would allow even one honest word to pass the guard at his mouth. But he said nothing.
Instead, he asked, “How are the girls?”
The question was kind, and because it was kind, she could not resent it cleanly.
She answered, “They are well.”
Poppy wanted to tell him of small matters, ordinary matters, the kind that made a household feel alive when one was allowed to belong to it.
He listened with perfect attention. That was almost unbearable, too.
Hector never failed in attention. He could make duty look like devotion until one reached for it and found one’s hands empty.
When she finished, he nodded. “I am glad.”
“You always say that.”
His brow drew together slightly. “Do I?”
“Yes.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
That was the trouble. She knew he meant what he said. He simply said so little that mattered.
His face turned more fully toward her. For an instant she thought something in him might yield. His mouth parted, and her pulse answered before he spoke. Then he closed it again.
The small refusal did what no sharp word could have done. It showed her that he had chosen this. Whatever he felt, whatever he feared, he had chosen the return to distance. He had found the place where they had stood before the kiss and stepped back into it as though obedience could erase memory.
Poppy folded her hands before her. “Was there anything else, Your Grace?”
His expression changed. Not much. With Hector, pain often appeared only as stillness.
“No,” he said. “I did not mean to detain you.”
He spoke as if she were a guest with another appointment. Or as if he had not held her face between his warm hands and kissed her senselessly two nights ago.
Poppy curtsied because she knew when she was unwanted and had to leave the room. “Then I shall leave you to your morning.”
“Poppy.”
She stopped at the sound of her name and turned back.
Hector stood as before, but the hand on his cane had tightened. His gray eyes fixed on hers. “I hope you understand that my concern is for your comfort.”
It was not what she had wanted to hear.
And because she was weary of being grateful for fragments, she said, “My comfort?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what this is about?”
He went still. “I beg your pardon?”
She should not continue. She knew that. Her pride would be exposed, and his power too great even though he had never used it cruelly. But some truths grew poisonous when swallowed too often.
“You are concerned for my comfort,” she said carefully. “Yet you decided to be formal, distant and careful not to say anything that might require either of us to remember what happened between us.”
His jaw tightened.
She had not imagined that he would try to forget their kiss.
Was it not good enough for him? Was I not good enough?
“Poppy,” he pulled her from her thoughts.
She looked down. “Please do not say any more.”
He drew in a deep breath. “I did not wish to cause you distress.”
“I know.”
The answer seemed to strike him. “Then you understand.”