Chapter Two #3
He opened his eyes and found himself staring at the door through which she had disappeared. His hands, still clasped behind his back, were aching from the force of his grip. He made himself release them, flexing his fingers one by one, forcing the tension from his body through sheer force of will.
She had no right to speak to him that way. No right to waltz into his home and dissect his failings with the precision of a physician. No right to look at him with those green-gold eyes and see straight through every wall he had built.
Children who have lost everything do not require silence. They require courage.
The words echoed in his mind, sharp as knives. Because she was right, damn her. She was absolutely, infuriatingly right.
He had been so careful with Henry. So determined to provide stability, structure, discipline—all the things a future duke would need.
He had hired the best tutors, the most qualified governesses, and he had created a schedule designed to prepare his brother for the weight of the title that would one day be his.
And somewhere along the way, he had forgotten that Henry was not just a future duke. He was a child. A little boy who had never known his parents, who had grown up in a house of grief and silence, who had learned to be invisible because visibility meant disappointment.
He is desperate for your attention, Your Grace, and terrified of disappointing you.
Alistair moved to the window, staring out at the moors without seeing them. The landscape blurred before his eyes, replaced by memories he had spent six years trying to bury.
His father, lying in that bed, delirious with fever and grief.
He was calling for his wife, refusing food, refusing water, refusing to live in a world that no longer contained her.
His hands were reaching for someone who was no longer there.
His voice, cracked and broken, was repeating her name like a prayer that would never be answered.
I cannot live without her.
Those had been his father's last coherent words.
And then, three days later, he had simply...
stopped. The physicians had called it complications from the accident, a fever that had taken hold and refused to release, but Alistair knew better.
His father had died of a broken heart. He had loved so deeply and completely that the loss of that love had destroyed him.
And Alistair had inherited everything: the title, the estates, the responsibilities, along with a six-month-old brother and a lesson that had been seared into his soul: Love is a weakness. Attachment is dangerous. The only way to survive is to never let anyone close enough to matter.
He had lived by that creed for six years. He had governed his estates with ruthless efficiency and his emotions with even greater discipline. He had taken no mistresses, kept no lovers, allowed no one past the walls he had constructed.
And he had kept Henry at arm's length, telling himself it was for the boy's own good. Discipline, structure and preparation. All the things that would make Henry strong enough to bear the weight of the dukedom someday.
But Miss Harrow had looked at his brother and seen something else entirely. A child starving for warmth. A little boy desperate for love.
And she had looked at Alistair and seen…What? A coward? A failure? A man so afraid of his own heart that he had frozen it solid rather than risk feeling anything at all?
He pressed his palm against the cold glass of the window, as if the chill could anchor him, could remind him of who he was and what he had to be. The Duke of Northmere. A man of control, a man of discipline and a man who did not allow himself to want things he could not have.
But the image of copper hair catching the light would not leave him.
A voice that had trembled with emotion when she spoke of courage, love, and joy.
She was everything he had trained himself to avoid. Warmth where he had chosen cold. Passion where he had chosen restraint. Fire where he had chosen ice.
And she was living in his house, caring for his brother and walking through his halls with that ridiculous hair escaping its pins and that impossible conviction lighting her eyes.
This was a problem.
He should dismiss her because it was the sensible thing to do.
He should find some fault with her performance, cite her insubordination, and send her away before she could cause any more disruption.
Before she could look at him again with those knowing eyes and see things he had buried so deep that he had almost forgotten they existed.
But even as he considered it, he knew he wouldn't do it.
Because she was right about Henry. Because his brother deserved better than four failed governesses in two years. Because somewhere beneath the ice, in a place he refused to acknowledge, Alistair wanted to know what would happen if he let her try.
He turned from the window and moved to his desk, sitting down heavily in his chair. His father's pocket watch sat in the drawer, as it always did; wound but never opened, a reminder of everything he had lost and everything he could not allow himself to want.
We will discuss the schedule further tomorrow, he had told her.
He would see her again tomorrow. And he would be perfectly professional, perfectly controlled, perfectly indifferent to her copper hair, her green eyes and her infuriating, irresistible conviction.
He forced himself not to think of her, but he failed completely.
***
Eliza was still trembling when she reached the nursery.
Not from fear but from the peculiar exhilaration of having said exactly what she meant to a man who clearly expected compliance and deference.
From the adrenaline of battle. From the unsettling awareness that the Duke of Northmere, for all his ice and control, had looked at her in a way that made her feel seen.
Truly seen, in a way that was both terrifying and oddly thrilling.
She paused outside the nursery door, pressing one hand to her chest and taking a steadying breath.
"You," she told herself firmly, "are a sensible woman of seven-and-twenty. You do not get flustered by handsome employers with stormy eyes and tragic pasts. You have a job to do, so focus on the job."
She opened the door.
Henry was exactly where she had left him, hunched over his slate with his letters perfectly formed in neat rows. He looked up as she entered, his expression carefully neutral, and she saw the question in his eyes before he could hide it.
Are you staying? Did he send you away?
"Well," Eliza said brightly, moving to sit beside him at the small table. "That was bracing. Your brother is quite intimidating, isn't he?"
Henry's eyes widened. Governesses, apparently, did not discuss the Duke in such terms.
"His Grace is... proper," Henry said carefully, as if testing the waters.
"Mmm. Very proper. I believe I may have been insufficiently proper in return.
I'm afraid I have a habit of saying what I think, which is generally considered a flaw in governesses.
" She smiled at him conspiratorially. "But I am still here, and I intend to remain here.
So perhaps we might set aside the letters for a bit and do something rather improper? "
"Improper?" Henry's voice was barely a whisper, as if the word itself might summon disapproval from the very walls.
"I thought," Eliza said, leaning in until their heads were nearly touching, "that you might tell me about Perseus. His adventures. The ones you're not supposed to imagine."
For a moment, Henry simply stared at her. She could see the war playing out behind his eyes: the longing to share battling against years of training that said imagination was unbecoming.
Then, slowly, a smile crept across his face—small and hesitant, but gloriously, beautifully real.
"He fought a dragon once," he said quietly. "In my head, I mean. Not a real dragon. But a very fierce one. It had scales the color of thunderclouds and eyes like burning coals."
"Tell me everything," Eliza said, and settled in to listen.
And Henry did. Haltingly at first, watching her face for signs of disapproval, then with growing confidence as he realized that none were coming.
He told her about Perseus battling the dragon to save a kingdom of mice, about Perseus flying through clouds made of cotton and silk and befriending a star who had fallen from the sky and needed help getting home.
Outside the nursery window, the Yorkshire moors stretched gray and endless under the autumn sky, but in the nursery, a little boy began, haltingly, to tell stories again.
It was, Eliza thought, an excellent beginning for more sunny days in Henry’s life.