Beyond Reason
Gideon moved at once.
He withdrew his hand from beneath Beatrice’s skirts, dragged the fabric carefully back into place, and pulled away to help Beatrice sit up.
But she hardly moved at all.
For one terrible, selfish heartbeat, the sight of her nearly destroyed him.
Flushed. Dazed. Boneless against the cushions. Her lips glistening, her eyes almost sleepy from what had just passed between them.
Christ.
“Beatrice,” he murmured.
She blinked at him.
Voices sounded again in the hall. Closer this time.
Gideon pulled her upright, and with careful hands, did his best to put her back to rights. A tug at her sleeve. A smoothing of her skirts. One swift glance over her hair.
Not perfect. Good enough.
Barely.
He had only just settled beside her when the drawing room door opened.
Dash stepped inside—and stopped.
And in that moment, Gideon’s blood went cold.
They were too close on the settee. Both of them flushed. Obviously guilty.
Any man with half his wits about him would have known at once that something had happened.
But Dash’s gaze only sharpened for an instant.
Then passed over them.
Not because there was nothing to see, but because Dash himself wasn’t seeing clearly.
And that was when Gideon truly looked at him.
That worn-out gardening costume. Muddy boots. A smear of soil along one hand. But none of that mattered.
There was devastation in his eyes. His friend, a man who was as close to a brother as he’d ever known, looked haunted.
Defeated.
Hollowed out by the sort of grief a man could not drink away, though Dash, Gideon knew, was determined to try.
Gideon went still.
He would have preferred a dagger in the gut.
Seeing Dash like this—wounded, grieving, still trusting him—made Gideon’s betrayal cut all the deeper.
Her scent still clung to Gideon’s hand. So did the memory of Beatrice shuddering against him, her breath broken, her fingernails scraping his neck as he brought her to the edge and watched her fall apart.
Beatrice, whom he had promised Dash he would protect—and whom he had, quite literally, compromised in her brother’s drawing room.
The heat of moments before drained from him.
No more.
Gideon was finished with secrets. With hiding. With pretending that postponing the inevitable would make it any easier to bear.
But before he could confess anything—before he could make anything right—he needed Dash back in the room. Not this hollow-eyed ghost. His friend. The duke. The brother Beatrice needed. The man more than one household depended upon.
Resting his arms on his knees, Gideon leaned forward.
“You need to stop,” he said.
The words came low. Hard. Final.
Dash’s attention snapped to him.
Good. Let him see… Let him rage, if that was what it took.
Beatrice drew a quick breath beside him. “Dash…” Her voice was thinner than usual, but steadying by the second. “Please, sit down.”
Dash did not sit. He paced in front of the door like a restless tiger.
Gideon kept his eyes on Dash, but he felt the change in Beatrice all the same. The tension gathering in her.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said. “You don’t eat. You don’t sleep. I hear you pacing the corridors half the night.”
Her voice caught, only slightly.
“This has gone too far.”
“She’s right, my friend.” Gideon’s voice softened, but not much. Dash did not need softness. Not now. “You’ve driven yourself to the edge over this.”
Dash whipped around, mouth twisted. “Have I?”
“Yes,” Gideon said. “And everyone in this house knows it.” He forced himself not to glance over at Beatrice. If he did, he risked being thrown back to those moments before Dash interrupted them.
“Don’t you think perhaps it is time to let her go?” Beatrice asked gently.
Dash laughed, a short, sharp, ugly sound that made Gideon’s jaw tighten.
“Let her go?” Dash repeated. “You speak as though it were so simple.”
“I know it isn’t simple,” said Beatrice. Gideon heard the strain beneath her composure. “But you’re destroying yourself. And still, she has not chosen you.”
“You don’t know,” he growled. “You’ve no idea what passes between us.”
“Do you?” Beatrice asked.
Dash stared at her as though she had slapped him.
“I can’t expect…” He shook his head once, his hand curling at his side. “Two years. I was gone for two years. Of course it will take time to repair things after—”
He broke off.
Gideon rose, walked across the room, and set a hand on Dash’s shoulder.
It was a familiar gesture. One he had used a hundred times to pull Dash back from one cliff or another. But this time, guilt moved beneath it.
Dash didn’t know that Gideon’s loyalty to him had become complicated by something else, something fiercer: guilt, desire, duty, and the feelings he had failed—spectacularly—to control.
Gideon swallowed hard.
“If she has not forgiven you by now,” he said quietly, “she may never.”
His friend went very still. But then, with an unusual violence, Dash sliced his hand through the air, knocking Gideon’s touch away.
“I’ve come this far,” Dash said. “She will decide in three days. I will give her that.”
Three days.
Gideon exchanged a glance with Beatrice before he could stop himself.
“Dash,” she whispered.
But Dash only looked between them with cold, wounded pride.
“Until then, both of you. Keep to your own business.”
Neither Beatrice nor Gideon answered. What the devil could either of them say?
Dash turned, shouldered past him, and strode from the room.
For several seconds, Gideon stood frozen. The room felt too quiet in Dash’s absence. Too bright. Too ridiculously ordinary for what had happened on the sofa, and what had just happened after.
He and Dash had argued before. They had even come to blows on a few occasions. But… he couldn’t recall Dash ever speaking to him that way.
Not in anger. Not in grief. Not even in those black months after Harrowgate, when blame had lived among them along with Sebastian’s ghost.
Gideon stared at the empty doorway. His heart cold. Heavy.
“It’s my fault,” he said.