If only he’d just committed to being with her, whatever life threw at them. Then, when Redwood cast his dye, no doubt born from his own assumptions of whathewould do with a low-born wife, Sebastian could have torn the man’s throat out with words. Could have defended her.Chosenher.
That realization stung him far deeper than the bustling wind and hail ever could. All she wanted was to be chosen.
Instead, he’d chosen this. Cowardice dressed up as pragmatism.
Instead, this.
Fool. You spectacular fool.
The gale picked up, vicious now, and he turned his face into it. Let it punish him. Below, waves threw themselves against rocks with the kind of violence he felt clawing inside his ribs. He had no desire to jump, but he could not fathom returning to an empty home.
His chest felt as though she had clawed out his heart and left a bloody mess in its place. He was all mangled flesh and shattered bone, and she had taken the only good part of him with her.
Sebastian sank onto the grass beside the lighthouse. Wind keened around the tower like something mourning. On the horizon, storm clouds gathered, moving closer.
In the end, Aurelia went to Lady Mary Ann’s house, largely because, for all her talking, she had nowhere to go. All her other friends—however few they may have been—were from before her tenure as a duchess and did not have the capacity to house her or her things.
Mary Ann was drinking tea in the drawing room when she arrived, and the girl jumped up, open distress clouding her face.
“Dearest! I hadn’t expected you would ever want to see me after Lord Redwood arrived yesterday. How can I ever tell you how sorry I am?” She wrung her hands. Her father dozed by the fire, oblivious to everything that happened around him.
Aurelia rather suspected that was the usual way of things.
“I never expected him to arrive. Or the Duchess of Fenwick, either, but Papa insisted I invite her—they were friends back in the day. He knew her before her marriage.” She grimaced. “And I rather suspect they knew each other after her marriage, if you catch my meaning. He was perfectly devoted to Mother when he finally met her, but he was somewhat older by then, as you may have guessed.”
By Aurelia’s estimation, he had to have been at least fifty before siring his only daughter, which made him rather older than the usual father—although such matches were not entirely unusual.
Aurelia led her friend through to the carriage with her things piled atop it. Now she was here, she felt the rashness of her actions. Packing to leave him for good when she had nowhere else to go—and assuming that she would have a place with Mary Ann.
Sebastian had just let her leave.
He had not apologized for not intending to keep her—instead, he had insisted it was not something she should concern herself with, as though a husband intending to throw his wife out when she bore him a babe was a trivial matter.
How could she ever forgive him?
Did shewantto? Just as everyone else in her life after her mother’s passing, he had failed to fight for her.
“Oh,duchess,” Mary Ann breathed, one hand over her mouth. “What’s happened?”
“I left him,” Aurelia mumbled, the words sounding somehow far more puerile when she let them out into the world.
Mary Ann’s eyes widened a touch. “Youleftthe duke?”
“I took everything from the house that I own, and I told him that if he tried to stop me, he would have lost me forever.”
Her friend shook her head, blonde curls bouncing. “But why? Because of Lord Redwood? Was the duke so angry that he was in attendance?”
Sebastianhadbeen angry, but he’d had no grounds for it; if he hadn’t wanted her to speak with the earl, then he could have come along. And it transpired Lord Redwood was telling her the truth regardless.
What else was she to do?
“Ileft him,” Aurelia repeated. “Not the other way around. He would have kept me if he could. But—”
Mary Ann took Aurelia’s hand, leading her to a small parlor. “Here, in case we wake Papa. Now, tell me everything.”
So Aurelia did. She told her friend about her circumstances before her marriage, and the means by which Sebastian had married her. “He neglected to so much as turn up to the wedding; he sent a proxy. And Mr. Arnold is a lovely man, but he is not the man I wished to marry.”
“The man you wished to marry is the duke.”
