Chapter Nine
“You’re going out, Your Grace? In this weather?”
Dominic paused in the entrance hall, one arm already in his greatcoat, and turned to find Graves regarding him with the particular expression of a butler who has formed an opinion but is too well-trained to express it.
“I require fresh air, Graves. The weather is immaterial.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Graves’s tone suggested the weather was, in fact, highly material, and that venturing out into a grey November afternoon bordered on folly. “Shall I have the groom saddle your horse?”
“No. I shall walk.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
Dominic finished settling his coat about him and reached for his hat, ignoring the weight of Graves’s silent disapproval. The man was not wrong. The day was damp and bitter, the sort of cold that crept into one’s bones and lingered. A sensible man would remain indoors, close to the fire.
Dominic had never felt less inclined to sense.
It had been a week since the storm. A week of breakfasts with Thomas, of visits to the nursery, of careful, halting steps toward something resembling connection.
A week of watching Lorraine move through his house as though she belonged to it.
A week of lying awake at night, replaying the brush of her fingers against his, the sound of his name in her voice, the way she had looked at him in the firelight.
He was going mad. There was no other explanation. Four years of deliberate numbness, and now he could not seem to stop feeling—could not stop wanting—could not stop thinking of a woman he had no right to want at all.
The air would steady him. It had to. Because if it did not, he would do something foolish—something he could not undo.
He stepped outside and let the cold strike him cleanly.
The grounds of Rovewood Hall stretched out before him, grey and brown and stripped of summer’s warmth.
The formal gardens had been put to bed for the winter, their rosebushes wrapped in burlap, their pathways scattered with fallen leaves.
Beyond them lay the wilder parkland—rolling hills dotted with ancient oaks, leading eventually to the moors that gave the estate its character.
Dominic set off along the main path, his boots grinding softly over gravel, his breath pale in the air. He walked without direction, allowing movement to stand in for thought.
It failed. Lorraine remained fixed in his mind, sharp and inescapable.
He had circled the ornamental lake and was nearing the eastern woods when he saw her.
She was coming toward him from the kitchen gardens, wrapped in a dark cloak, hood drawn against the wind. Her step was quick and purposeful. Her cheeks were bright with cold.
She saw him and stopped.
For a moment, they stood facing one another across the path, the wind moving between them.
“Your Grace.” She curtsied, precise and formal. “I did not expect to meet anyone out today.”
“Nor I.” He closed the distance between them. “You are far from the house.”
“I needed air.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “The nursery had begun to feel… confined.”
“And Thomas?”
“Asleep. Jenny is with him.” She hesitated. “I hope I am not neglecting my duties. I simply could not bear to be inside any longer.”
“You are not.” The words came more sharply than he intended. He moderated his tone. “You have done more for him in a month than I managed in five. You are entitled to walk where you please.”
“You are generous, Your Grace.”
“I am not generous. I am accurate.” He glanced ahead along the path. “May I walk with you?”
A pause—brief, but not empty.
“I should like that,” she said.
They fell into step.
The woods received them in silence. Bare branches arched overhead, and the ground lay thick with fallen leaves. Their footsteps were softened by it.
For a time, they walked without speaking.
“I used to walk like this with my father,” Lorraine said at last. “Every Sunday, regardless of the weather.”
Dominic glanced at her. Her expression had grown thoughtful, touched with a hint of melancholy.
“Where would you go?”
“Everywhere.” A small smile. “He knew the land intimately—every path, every hollow. He would show me where foxes denned, where mushrooms grew, which plants were useful and which were best avoided.”
She adjusted her cloak as the wind shifted.
“I think it was his way of giving me something larger than what we had. We could not travel. There was no London season, no grand tour. But he made the world we had feel sufficient.”
“He sounds a remarkable man.”
“He was.” Her voice softened. “He was impractical, and given to dreams, and generous to a fault. He spent half our income on books and the other half on charitable causes my mother considered frivolous. But he loved us—my sister and me—with such complete devotion that I never once doubted I was wanted.”
Dominic thought of his own father—the cold silences, the perpetual disappointment, the sense of being measured against some impossible standard and always found lacking.
He had never doubted that the old Duke wanted him, but only in the way one wanted an heir: as an instrument, a continuation, a vessel for the family name.
“You were fortunate,” he said quietly. “To have that certainty.”
“I know.” Lorraine turned to him, and there was understanding in her gaze—something deeper beneath it, something that made his chest tighten. “The loss does not fade, not entirely. But one learns to carry it.”
“Does one?”
“One must.” Her smile held, though it was touched with sadness. “The alternative is to be crushed by it. And I have no intention of allowing that.”
They walked on in silence. The path brought them to the edge of the woods, where the land opened into rolling moorland, dull with spent heather beneath a low autumn sky.
“I don’t know how to carry it,” Dominic heard himself say. The words came unbidden, drawn from somewhere deep and long-buried. “The weight of it. Some days I think I shall drown.”
Lorraine stopped. He did the same, turning to face her, and found her watching him closely.
“What weight?” she asked. “Spain? Your friend?”
“All of it. Spain, William, the men who died—the ones I could not save.” He gave a short, humourless breath. “Thomas, most of all. Every time I look at him, I see what I have failed. Who I have failed.”
“You have not failed Thomas. You are trying—”
“Trying isn’t enough.” His voice broke. He had not meant to say it—not meant to open himself like this—but the words kept coming, as though something long sealed had split at last. “Four years I’ve been trying to put myself back together, and I am still broken.
Still frozen. I watch you with him—watch you give him what he needs so easily, so naturally—and I think, that is what he deserves.
That is what William would have wanted for him. Not me. Not—this shadow of a man.”
“Dominic.”
His name in her voice stopped him. She had come closer without his noticing—close enough that he could see the fine mist caught in her hair, the faint scatter of freckles across her nose.
“You are not that,” she said, the force of it quiet but unyielding. “You are a man who survived something terrible. A man who is still surviving, every day. That requires strength.”
“It does not feel like strength.” He gave a short, strained breath. “It feels like cowardice. Hiding. Keeping everyone at a distance—”
“And yet here you are.” Her gaze held his. “Walking with me. Speaking to me. Saying things you have never said aloud. That is not cowardice, Dominic. That is courage.”
He stared at her. The wind moved sharply around them, but he barely felt it.
“You see too much,” he said, hoarse. “You have from the first. From the moment you looked at me as though you could see straight through me.”
“I did not see what you think.” Her voice softened, though the steadiness remained. “I saw pain. Loneliness. A man who had forgotten how to let himself be human.”
She lifted her hand—then paused, the gesture arrested in the space between them.
“I still see all of that,” she went on quietly. “But I see something else as well. Someone who is learning to remember. And that, Your Grace, is no small thing.”
Her hand fell back to her side.
The moment passed, leaving Dominic breathless, with the distinct, aching sense of something almost—almost—reached.
“We should return,” Lorraine said after a moment. Her voice was not entirely steady. “The day is drawing in. Thomas will wonder where I am.”
“Yes.” He did not move. “Yes.”
Still, neither of them turned.
“Lorraine.”
Her name felt unfamiliar on his tongue—too intimate, too deliberate.
“I do not know what I am doing,” he said. “I do not know how to be what you—what anyone—” He broke off, frustration tightening his voice. “I am not good at this.”
“Neither am I.” She smiled, and there was something fragile in it, something that echoed the rawness in him. “I have spent years convincing myself I need no one. That it is safer that way.”
“Is it?”
“I thought so. Once.”
“And now?”
She met his gaze. The moor stretched behind her, vast and colourless beneath the lowering sky, the wind tugging at her cloak.
“Now I am not certain,” she said softly. “Now I think perhaps safety is overrated.”
They turned back toward the house.
The path narrowed as it re-entered the trees, forcing them into a single file before widening again. When they fell into step once more, their arms brushed—wool against wool—and neither drew away.
The contact was slight. Accidental. Nothing that could not be explained.
And yet Dominic felt it with a clarity that startled him—the awareness of her nearness, the quiet warmth of her presence against the cold air, the rhythm of her steps beside his.
He did not move away.
Neither did she.
They walked on in silence, and the silence had changed—no longer easy, but charged, threaded with everything left unsaid.
When they emerged from the woods, Rovewood Hall rose before them, its windows beginning to glow against the gathering dusk. The sight ought to have broken whatever held them—to have reminded them of distance, of rank, of consequence.
It did not.
“Thank you,” Lorraine said quietly, as they reached the fork in the path. “For the walk. For the conversation.”
“And you,” he said. “For listening.”
He turned to her fully. The space between them felt at once too wide and dangerously narrow.
“Lorraine, I—”
“Don’t.” She lifted a hand, stopping him. There was strain in her expression now. “Whatever you are about to say—don’t. Not yet.”
He stilled.
“We must be careful,” she said, more steadily. “We must think.”
“I have done nothing but think for four years. I am tired of it.”
“Then think a little longer.” A faint, sad smile touched her mouth. “For both our sakes. I cannot afford recklessness, Dominic. And you cannot afford… to be unkind. So we must be careful. Even if it is the last thing we wish to be.”
He knew she was right.
The distance between them was not imagined. If he crossed it without thought, she would bear the greater cost.
“Careful,” he repeated. The word sat ill with him. “Yes. I suppose that’s wise.”
“It is not what I want,” she said softly. “But it is what must be.”
She turned and walked toward the servants’ entrance, her cloak shifting with her stride. At the door, she paused and looked back—one long glance, quiet and unmistakable.
Then she was gone.
Dominic remained where he was, the cold pressing in, his arm still faintly warm where it had brushed against hers.
Careful. Wise.
He felt neither.
He felt like a man standing at the edge of something he could not name, knowing the fall would change everything—and unable to step back.
He went inside.
The whisky waited for him. He poured a measure, watched the amber catch the light—and then tipped it into the grate, untouched.
Numbness no longer held any appeal.
He wanted to feel it. All of it—the fear, the want, the dangerous, impossible hope that had taken hold despite him.
He wanted her.
And for the first time in four years, wanting something did not feel like weakness. It felt like the beginning of something perilously close to being alive.
That night, he did not pace.
He sat in the library—in her chair—and read by the fire until the lines blurred. His thoughts returned, again and again, to the same things: walking paths, grief borne rather than buried, the brief, electric brush of her arm against his.
Lorraine.
And when he finally went to bed, he slept without dreams for the first time since Spain.