Chapter Twenty-Four
“You promised me tomorrow.”
Lorraine stood in the doorway of his study at nine in the morning, still in her teaching dress, her hair pinned with the ruthless efficiency that spoke of a restless night. Dominic recognised the signs, because he had not slept at all.
He had spent the night in the chair beside the dead fire, fully dressed, turning the situation over and over like a man examining a wound he already knew to be mortal. The brandy bottle sat untouched upon the desk—a small victory, though it felt like none.
He had reached his conclusion sometime toward dawn, when the grey light began to seep through the curtains and the house lay so still he could hear his own heartbeat.
The conclusion was simple. It was the only one available to a man who loved two people and believed he could protect them only by letting them go.
“Close the door,” he said.
She did. Folded her arms. Waited.
He had rehearsed this. In the long hours between midnight and morning, he had constructed his argument with the same cold precision he had once applied to battle—every word chosen, every objection anticipated, every weakness accounted for. It was rational. Impeccable. Unassailable.
It lasted twelve seconds.
“The Hardings will take Thomas,” he said.
“That is what will happen. The law supports their claim. The barrister has confirmed it. And nothing I have seen since their arrival suggests they will be persuaded otherwise. They loved William. They want Thomas. They are capable people who will give him a home.”
“I know all of this,” Lorraine said evenly. “You are not telling me anything new.”
“I am telling you what follows from it.” He rose and moved to the window, because he could not do this while looking at her.
“When Thomas goes, your position here ends. A governess without a charge has no reason to remain. If you stay—in any capacity—it will be remarked upon. The staff already suspect. Mrs Potter certainly knows. And if the Hardings learn that the Duke and the governess—”
“They will not.”
“They might. James Harding is observant. He watches everything.” Dominic fixed his gaze on the window, seeing nothing beyond it. “If the nature of our—association—becomes known, it damages you. Irrevocably. Your reputation, which you have already sacrificed once—”
“Do not presume to manage my reputation.”
“—will be destroyed entirely. You will not find another position. You will not find another household willing to employ a governess known to have been intimate with her employer. The previous scandal was a rumour. This would be fact.”
The silence that followed had weight.
Lorraine did not move. Did not speak. Did not do any of the things he had braced himself for—tears, persuasion, the fierce emotional force she wielded so effectively.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“No.” He turned from the window. The sight of her—composed, pale, her eyes fixed on him with an unreadable steadiness—nearly broke him.
“Thomas. If I contest this and lose—which I will, because I have no standing—the process will be ugly. Courts. Barristers. Arguments conducted in his hearing. He will be caught in the middle. He will believe it is his fault, because that is what children do.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know him. I know what loss does to him. The worst thing I could do to William’s son is turn his leaving into a battleground.
” His voice remained steady—too steady, the product of too many hours spent shaping it.
“The kindest thing I can do—the only responsible thing—is to let him go cleanly. Let the Hardings take him without conflict. Let him remember Rovewood as a place of kindness, not contention.”
“And me?” Lorraine’s chin lifted—the gesture he knew too well. “What is the kindest thing you can do for me?”
Let you go, he thought, and the words were so vast, so annihilating, that for a moment he could scarcely breathe.
“End this,” he said. “Before it does more harm.”
“End this.” She repeated it, quietly. Testing it. “You wish to end this.”
“I wish to protect—”
“Do not.” The word cracked through the room. “Do not stand there and call this protection. Do not pretend that destroying the best thing that has ever happened to either of us is an act of kindness.”
“Lorraine—”
“You are not protecting me. You are not protecting Thomas. You are protecting yourself.” She stepped toward him, and the composure she had carried into the room began to fracture.
He saw it—in the brightness of her eyes, the tremor in her jaw, the tension in her hands.
“You are doing exactly what you did after Badajoz. Exactly what you did after the letter. You are faced with something that frightens you, and instead of fighting, you freeze.”
“This is not the same—”
“It is precisely the same. It is the same pattern you have followed for four years. Something begins to matter, and you seal it off before it can wound you. William mattered, so you sealed off Thomas. Thomas began to matter, so you shut yourself in your study. I began to matter, so you—”
She broke off, drawing a breath that trembled.
“So you stand here and call it an arrangement, and speak of ending it cleanly, as though we were dissolving a business agreement. As though I did not hold you in the dark while you wept for men whose names you carry like a burden. As though you did not kneel on a nursery floor and promise a child you would not leave him.” Her voice dropped.
“As though you did not tell me you loved me.”
The words hung between them—fragile and immovable.
“I do love you,” Dominic said, and the admission stripped him bare. “That is why—”
“If the next words you speak are ‘that is why I must let you go,’ I will never forgive you.”
He closed his mouth.
Lorraine crossed the remaining distance between them. She stood before him—close enough that he could see everything she was refusing to hide: the anger, the grief, the love that made both unbearable.
“You have spent four years punishing yourself for three seconds in a Spanish ravine,” she said, her voice low and fierce.
“And I have watched you—for three months I have watched you—climb out of that grave, inch by inch. I have watched you hold a child, admire a child’s painting, and love me as though the world might end.
” She held his gaze. “Do not climb back in.”
He said nothing.
He had no words left. The careful argument lay in ruins, dismantled by a woman who fought not with logic, but with truth—and who knew every weakness in him, because he had shown them to her, willingly, in the dark, believing—foolishly—that such vulnerability was anything other than a loaded weapon aimed at his own chest.
“Tell me,” Lorraine said. “Say the words. Look at me and tell me it is over—and mean it.”
He looked at her. At the face he had committed to memory—the faint scatter of freckles, the storm-sea eyes, the stubborn set of her chin, the mouth he had kissed a thousand times and would have bartered his soul to kiss again.
At the woman who had walked into his frozen house and refused to leave, who had coaxed speech from a silent child and tears from a silent man and hope from a place where it had lain dead for four years.
“It is over,” he said. “You should begin making arrangements to leave once the Hardings depart with Thomas.”
The words fell flat. Bloodless. The voice of a man who had severed something vital and was remaining upright only through sheer, stubborn refusal to collapse.
Lorraine absorbed it. He saw the impact move through her—the flinch she suppressed, the brightness in her eyes spilling over into a single tear that traced her cheek before she brushed it away.
“Do you know what William would say?” she asked quietly. “If he could see you now?”
Dominic’s chest tightened. “Do not.”
“He would say the same thing Julian said. The same thing I have said. The same thing Thomas says every time he takes your hand and asks you not to leave.” She stepped back. Drew herself up. Met his gaze with a steadiness that, for the first time, made him uneasy.
“You are a coward, Dominic Vane. Not because you froze in Spain. Not because you are afraid. But because you have two people who love you—who chose you, who stayed for you, who fought for you—and you are casting us aside because fighting for us is harder than losing us.” Her voice did not waver.
“And I will not stand here and make it easy for you.”
She turned and walked out.
The door closed behind her. Not a slam—Lorraine Weston did not slam doors. A quiet, precise click that was somehow worse, because it sounded like finality.
Dominic stood in the silence of his study, surrounded by ledgers, unopened correspondence, and the crooked kestrel painting upon the wall, and felt the ice close over his head.
For the first time in months, it did not feel like safety.
It felt like drowning.
***
He did not leave the study for the remainder of the day.
Graves brought food he did not touch. Mrs Potter brought tea that went cold beside him. At some point in the afternoon, he heard Thomas’s voice in the corridor—
“Is His Grace busy? I wanted to show Grandmama my kestrel painting—”
—and Jenny’s gentle diversion, the small footsteps retreating, and the silence that followed was the precise, cutting silence of a man hearing the consequence of his own choices walking away in small shoes.
This is what you wanted, he told himself.
A clean break. No conflict. No ugliness.
Thomas will go with people who love him.
Lorraine will find another position, another household, another life that does not include a man who destroys everything he touches.
This is the responsible choice. The rational choice. The choice William would have—
He stopped.
Because the truth—the sharp, unignorable truth—was that William would not have made this choice.
William, who had run into a burning building in Salamanca to drag out a stableboy he did not know.
William, who had volunteered for every dangerous assignment because someone must, and it might as well be him.
William, who met the world’s worst offerings not with withdrawal, but with reckless, incandescent defiance.
William would have fought.
William would have stood before the Hardings and said: I love your grandson.
He is mine—not by blood, but by promise.
By choice. By the fact that I held him while he wept, taught him the names of birds, placed his father’s compass in his hand, and hung his painting upon my wall.
He is mine, and I will not surrender him.
William would have looked at Lorraine and said: I do not care for scandal. I do not care for rank. I do not care what society decrees. You are the woman who saved me, and I will spend the rest of my life proving you were right to do so.
William would have done all of this without hesitation, without calculation, without three hours of rehearsal in a darkened room.
Because William had never been afraid of love.
William had been afraid of nothing.
And William was dead.
And Dominic was alive; hiding in his study while the people who loved him walked away.
Coward.
Lorraine’s voice. Julian’s. His own, at last—the one he had buried beneath years of silence, restraint, and the careful maintenance of an isolation that had never protected him from anything except the possibility of happiness.
He looked at the kestrel painting. At its uneven lines, its earnest colours, the careful inscription: For His Grace.
He looked at the brandy bottle, still untouched.
He looked at his hands—scarred, clenched, unsteady.
And for the first time in four years, he did not reach for the ice.