Chapter 13 #5
Something in his chest eased slightly at that, though he could not have said why her wellbeing should matter to him so particularly.
He told himself it was only that Sarah had grown fond of her, that the household ran more smoothly with a duchess in good health at the head of it. Reasonable explanations. Sensible ones.
They rose from the table together. Augusta gathered her shawl from the back of her chair, and Ronan reached for his cane out of habit rather than need, and for a moment neither of them said anything more, the quiet of the room settling comfortably between them the way it had begun, lately, to do.
It was only as they reached the door that the quiet became something else.
Ronan had meant to hold it open for her.
He always did. But he misjudged the distance, or she did, or perhaps neither of them was paying quite as much attention as they ought, because they arrived at the threshold together, and suddenly there was almost no space left between them at all…
her shoulder nearly brushing his chest, her face tilted up toward his, close enough that he could see the exact shade of green in her eyes in the candlelight, something between moss and new leaves.
Augusta stepped back at once.
Ronan frowned. “Did I do something?”
“No.” The word came too quickly to be entirely convincing.
“Are you angry with me?”
“No,” she said again, and took another step back regardless, putting a full arm’s length of distance between them, as though the doorway itself had become dangerous.
Ronan did not know why he followed her.
He told himself, later, that it was concern — that she had gone pale again, or looked as though she might, and that a husband was entitled to ask his wife whether she was well without it meaning anything at all.
But in the moment he was aware of nothing so reasonable.
He only knew that he closed the distance she had just created until he was standing close enough to see her breath catch.
“Augusta. What is wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.” Her voice had gone thinner than usual.
“You keep stepping away from me.”
“Do I?” She said it as though the observation surprised her as much as it did him, which he found, absurdly, almost charming.
It was then that he noticed the smudge of flour caught along her cheekbone, just beneath her left eye.
It must have been there through the whole of dinner.
He lifted his hand before he had entirely decided to do so, meaning only to brush it away, the way he might have done for Sarah without a second thought.
Augusta gasped.
For one instant Ronan went entirely still, certain he had frightened her, that whatever fragile ease had grown between them these past weeks had just been undone by his own careless hand reaching for her face without warning. He began to draw back.
But her cheek, where his fingers had barely grazed it, had gone a deep, unmistakable pink, spreading slowly down toward her throat, and her breath was coming faster now, not slower, and she was not looking at him at all.
She was looking somewhere just past his shoulder, at the doorframe, at the floor, at anything that was not his face.
Not fear, then.
“Look at me,” he said, low.
It was not an order, exactly. He had not meant it to come out that way.
But Augusta lifted her eyes to his regardless, slowly, as though it cost her something to do it, and when she did, Ronan forgot, for one long and thoroughly reckless moment, every reasonable thing he had ever told himself about the nature of their marriage.
She was so close. Close enough that he could have closed the last of the distance between them without either of them taking another step.
Close enough that he found himself looking, quite deliberately now, at her mouth, and thinking that he wanted very much to know what she tasted like, whether she would gasp again if he kissed her the way he wanted to, slow and thorough, until neither of them was thinking of flour or dinner or anything at all beyond this doorway.
His hand was still against her cheek.
He had promised her friendship. He had promised her time. He had told her, that very first night, that he did not need an heir, that she owed him nothing, that they had years ahead of them and no cause to rush toward anything neither of them was ready for. He had meant every word of it.
And yet here he stood, in his own doorway, wanting to break every one of those careful promises at once.
Ronan drew his thumb once, gently, across her cheekbone — finishing what he had begun, nothing more — and then made himself step back.
“There,” he said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended. “You had flour on your face.”
Augusta blinked, as though surfacing from somewhere very far away. “Oh,” she said faintly. “Thank you.”
“Goodnight, Augusta.”
He was already turning before she could answer, already walking toward his study with a great deal more purpose than the hour required, because he needed, quite urgently, to put several rooms and a locked door between himself and his own wife before he did something neither of them would know how to recover from.
He must have lost his mind.