“I thought we might venture out to the seaside, if you wrap up warm,” he said gruffly. “Sea air, by all accounts, has restorative properties.”
She furrowed her brows. “Do we not have sea air here, so close to the clifftops?”
“It shall be different on the beach itself.”
Well, she could hardly argue against that. “Are you ever going to tell me where you disappeared to when I followed you into the mist?”
Sebastian tensed, his knuckles turning white, and he lowered his soup spoon back against the bowl. “I see you are single-minded today.”
“You had plenty of opportunities to tell me, but you did not. So now I’m asking. What is it you keep leaving the house to see? And why are you so resistant to me following you?”
His jaw tightened. “I am not obliged to have my wife everywhere I go.”
“No, notobliged. But you were angry to see me following you.”
“Yes,” he admitted, the word sounding as though it was ripped from him. “I had no desire for you to follow me. That is—it’s a private pilgrimage. A place I go to remember.”
“Remember what?”
“…My former wife.”
The one he had killed, according to the rumors. Only, his face did not look like that of a man who had murdered his wife in cold blood. He looked anguished, deep down, as though there was a wound there, and she had pressed on its painful edges until blood beaded.
“Tell me about her,” Aurelia said softly.
Sebastian glanced at her, a hard line between his brows. She had the sudden impulse to smooth it away. “Why should I tell my current wife about my former one?”
“Because you loved her.” The moment she said the words, she knew them to be true. And there was a strange feeling in her stomach at knowing this—a pressure, anache. She felt both relieved that he had loved her—to know he was capable of love—and a strong desire to protest thevalidityof that love…
Foolish inclination. She had no reason to believe thisKatewas anything other than good and loving.
Sebastian toyed with his glass as he thought. “I am not accustomed to speaking about her,” he murmured.
“By that, I suppose you mean no one has asked?” She leaned forward. “Or perhaps you have resisted anyone who has.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed wryly.
“Was it a love match?”
He nodded once. “I first met her in a London ballroom, and the moment I laid eyes on her, I knew I needed to have her. The courtship was short; her mother certainly thought so. I brought her back here to begin our lives, and that was when the trouble started.”
“Trouble?”
“Catherine and I were… not happy together.” He pronounced these words as though they were fragile glass, liable to shatter at any second. “I thought we would be, but she wanted something more than this estate and the land it was built on. And I wanted to grow my legacy, to become the kind of man my father had been. She wanted glittering parties in London, thrown as a duchess with her duke on display.”
Aurelia had never seen a marriage like this firsthand, but she had heard of them. A gentleman blinded by beauty and a lady blinded by rank, married quickly and for all the wrong reasons, and deeply unhappy for it. And if Catherine had died, that would mean Sebastian had been left with the guilt, blaming himself for all the ways in which they had been unhappy.
“We married young,” he pressed on. “And at the time, I thought I was a man who knew what I wanted—and it was her—but I think I had been as young men often are.Foolish. Which is not to say,” he added, his frown deepening, “that I didnotwant her, or I shouldnothave married her—although evidently I should not. She had many, many good points, but I was young and stubborn too, and I refused to give where I might have done.”
Aurelia suspected that was not a trait he had outgrown. Being a duke likely had something to do with it; he had grown up being accustomed to getting his way at every juncture and did not appreciatenotdoing so.
“What were your favorite traits of hers?”
His gaze turned distant as he looked into his past. “She could light up a room by walking into it. There was a grace and lightness to her. Truly, she was born for Society, and I deprived her by insisting she stay here with me as my prize.”
And yet, that was what he wanted from her. Except she was being held less as his prize than his ransom. A captive wife, brought to his life out of necessity rather than desire.
His gaze focused on Aurelia again, and she could practically see the way he gave himself a mental shake. “Enough of that. She is part of the past.”
