Chapter Seven #2
"I told myself it was for his own good. That discipline and structure would prepare him for the world.
That emotional restraint was a gift I was giving him; the armour I had forged for myself, passed down to protect him from the same wounds.
" He laughed, but there was no humor in it.
"I was so convinced that I was doing the right thing, that I was being strong and that I was protecting both of us. "
"But you were both suffering."
"Yes." The word came out barely above a whisper. "We were both suffering. I just didn't let myself see it until you came and showed me what I was doing. What I had done."
Eliza felt tears prick at her eyes. She understood the cold distance, the rigid schedules, the desperate insistence on control.
It wasn't cruelty. It had never been cruelty.
It was survival. The only way he knew to protect himself from a pain he had already witnessed once and couldn't bear to experience again.
"I used to watch him, you know," Alistair continued, his voice distant.
"When he was a baby. I would stand in the nursery doorway and watch him sleep, and I would feel this...
this terror. This certainty that something would happen to him, and I wouldn't be able to bear it.
So, I stopped watching, stopped going to the nursery, and I stopped letting myself feel anything for him at all. "
"But you never stopped loving him."
"No." His gray eyes met hers, and in them she saw years of carefully suppressed grief.
"That's the irony, isn't it? I built all these walls to protect myself from love, and it didn't work.
It never worked. I loved him anyway. I just expressed it through schedules and expectations instead of tenderness.
I thought I was keeping myself safe, but all I did was make us both miserable. "
"And now?"
"Now I don't know what to do." The admission seemed to cost him; this proud man who had spent years pretending he had all the answers.
"I've spent so long being cold that I don't know how to be warm.
I look at you with Henry, the way you hold him, the way you comfort him, and I don't know how to do any of it.
It's like watching someone speak a language I've forgotten. "
"You haven't forgotten," Eliza said softly. "You've just locked it away. The capacity for warmth, for tenderness, is still there. I've seen it."
"When?"
"When you touched his hair that night in the nursery.
When you looked at him, your whole face changed.
" She urged Misty closer, until their horses were side by side, until she could have reached out and touched him if she dared.
"When you sat on his bed and let yourself feel, just for a moment, what it was like to love him without walls between you. "
Alistair's breath caught. "You saw that?"
"I saw everything." She held his gaze, willing him to understand. "And what I saw wasn't a cold man incapable of feeling. I saw a man who feels so deeply that he's terrified of it. Who has spent years trying to protect himself from the very thing that makes him human."
"Miss Harrow…"
"Eliza." The name slipped out before she could stop it. "If we're going to have this conversation, if we're going to talk about feelings and fear and learning to love, you might as well call me by my name."
Something flickered in his expression. "That would be highly improper."
"We passed that stage several miles ago, I think. Somewhere around the time you told me about your father's death."
He was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly: "Eliza."
Her name on his lips did something strange to her insides, something warm and fluttering that had no business being there.
She told herself it meant nothing and that it was simply the intimacy of the moment, the vulnerability of the conversation.
That it didn't matter that her name sounded different when he said it, as if it had been waiting all along to be spoken in that particular voice.
"I went to Henry last night," he said finally. "After you left."
Eliza's heart stuttered. "You did?"
"I stood in his doorway for nearly an hour, trying to find the words." A muscle jumped in his jaw. "He was asleep. I didn't wake him. But I…I sat beside his bed. And I watched him breathe. And I tried to remember what it felt like to love someone without being afraid."
"Did you remember?"
"No." His voice was rough. "But I remembered that I wanted to. And that felt like... a beginning."
A beginning. Indeed. That was exactly what it was.
They sat together in the brightening morning, their horses standing patient and still, and for the first time since she had arrived at Northmere Hall, Eliza felt like she was seeing the real man beneath the title.
Not the Duke, not the frozen guardian. Just Alistair—wounded and struggling and trying, against everything he had taught himself, to find his way back to feeling.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "For telling me. I know it wasn't easy."
"Nothing about you is easy, Miss Harrow." But there was warmth in his voice now; the faintest thread of it, almost buried beneath the habitual reserve, but unmistakably there. "You are quite possibly the most difficult woman I have ever encountered."
"I believe you mentioned that once before. At our first meeting, if I recall."
"Did I? I must have been more perceptive than I realised."
Was that…Was that a jest? Was the Duke of Northmere actually attempting humor?
Eliza felt something bubble up in her chest, something that felt dangerously like affection. "I prefer to think of myself as 'challenging,'" she said. "It sounds more dignified than 'difficult.'"
"You may think of yourself however you like. I shall continue to think of you as the woman who stormed into my garden and told me I was failing my brother."
"You were failing him."
"I know." The admission came quietly, without defensiveness. "I know I was. I've been failing him for six years. But I…" He looked at her, and in his gray eyes she saw something that made her breath catch. "I would like to do better. If you'll help me."
"Help you?"
"Teach me." The words seemed to cost him, but he continued. "Teach me how to be what he needs. How to love him without being afraid of what it might cost. How to…" He stopped for a while. "How to feel."
Eliza's heart was pounding. This was dangerous territory. This was a line she shouldn't cross if she wanted to maintain any semblance of professional distance. But looking at him now, vulnerable and struggling and so desperately wanting to change, she couldn't bring herself to refuse.
"I can try," she said. "But it won't be comfortable. Learning to feel after years of numbness…It's like blood returning to a frozen limb. It hurts."
"I'm not afraid of pain."
"You're afraid of everything else. Pain might be a welcome change."
Something flickered in his expression—surprise, perhaps, at her boldness. Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth curved upward.
It wasn't quite a smile. It was too cautious for that, too tentative. But it was closer to a smile than anything she had seen from him, and it transformed his face in ways that made her stomach flutter.
"Shall we ride back?" he asked. "Henry will be waking soon, and I believe I owe him an apology as well."
"You do." She gathered Misty's reins, suddenly aware of how long they had been sitting there, and how intimate the conversation had become. "A significant one. Preferably involving hugs and possibly some form of treat."
"I don't hug."
"You're going to learn."
He made a sound that might have been a laugh; startled and rusty, as if the mechanism hadn't been used in years. "You're very demanding, Miss Harrow."
"I prefer 'persistent.' It sounds more dignified than 'demanding.'"
"Noted."
They turned their horses toward home and rode back across the moors as the sun rose fully, painting the heather in shades of purple and gold.
Eliza was acutely aware of his presence beside her, and she knew that something had shifted between them.
She could feel it in the air, in the way he glanced at her when he thought she wasn't looking, in the careful space they maintained between their horses that somehow felt more charged than any touch.
It was still impossible, still inappropriate and still the kind of feeling that got governesses dismissed and hearts broken.
But riding beside him in the morning light, knowing what she now knew about the wounds he carried, Eliza found she couldn't bring herself to regret it.
Some things were worth the risk.
***
They found Henry in the breakfast room, carefully arranging his toast soldiers with the mechanical precision that always made Eliza's heart ache. He looked up when they entered, his face going carefully blank; the mask of the perfect little lord, showing nothing that might invite criticism.
But his eyes darted to his brother with barely concealed hope.
"Henry." Alistair's voice was different from what Eliza had ever heard. It was softer, almost uncertain. "May I speak with you?"
The boy nodded, setting down his fork with exaggerated care.
Alistair crossed the room and, to Eliza's complete astonishment, lowered himself into the chair beside his brother rather than remaining standing in his usual position of authority. It put them at eye level, face to face, closer than Eliza had ever seen them.
"I was wrong," Alistair said. "Yesterday. In the garden. What I said to you was wrong, and I am sorry."
Henry's eyes went wide. Clearly, apologies from His Grace were not a common occurrence.
"You were hurt and frightened, and you needed comfort. Instead, I told you to hide your feelings, and that was…" Alistair stopped, his jaw tightening. "That was cruel. I didn't mean it to be cruel, but it was. And I'm sorry."
"I…" Henry's voice was barely a whisper. "I don't understand."