“It was not your fault,” she said achingly, for it was what he needed to hear.
What she needed to say aloud. The Duke of Whitley had not murdered his friend. He was not colluding with the French or anyone else. His every correspondence suggested he was, at heart, a good man. A good man who spent his days numbing himself with drink and pleasure in an endless attempt to keep his mind from the weightier matters troubling him.
“Do you know I have not spoken of that day with anyone?” he asked suddenly.
She shook her head slowly, uncertain if she should be grateful for his trust or suspicious of it. “Your Grace, I—”
“Crispin,” he interrupted with his renewed demand. “You’re in my chamber, in my arms, in the blackest hour of the night. Surely you can say it now.”
“Crispin,” she tried, and swallowed, finding she liked it far too much on her tongue.
“Do I frighten you?” His question, issued in that velvet-soft drawl she had come to know so well—never failing to elicit gooseflesh—startled her.
Yes.
“No.” Her answer was breathless. Simple. Another lie between them.
But she did not fear him in the manner he implied but rather in another altogether. He frightened her heart, for his vulnerability made her soften toward him in a way she had not before. Here was the man who loved his sisters and wept at his mother’s memory. Here was the man who danced with wild abandon, whose touch was gentle, who…
Swallowing, she realized she had not felt such a magnitude of emotion for a man before. Her heart and life had been closed, and she had been happy to make Father and his work her world. She had loved James, but she had been a naïve girl when they had wed. And they had scarcely had the chance to grow together when he had gone, never to return.
“Damnation, woman,” the duke groaned, and then he pulled her body against his so snugly there seemed to be not even a hint of distance between them. “I ought to frighten you. It would be wise for you to fear me.”
Every part of her, from her breasts to her hips, pressed into his hard, masculine form. She ought to push him away, she knew. To break contact. End this madness. But her hands moved to his back from his arms, stroking over the hewn contours. His skin was smooth and hot, like silk and velvet and yet so much power rippled beneath the surface. She never wanted to stop touching him. To stop comforting him.
His arms banded about her.
She felt calm in a way she had not for as long as she could recall, as if she had just come home after a long journey abroad. As if she had found the place where she belonged.
How silly. How untrue, surely. And yet, she could not banish the sensation skittering along her spine, settling low in her belly.
He buried his face in her hair, and for a span of time, neither of them spoke. They held still, the ink of the night somehow dimming the harsh realities that would keep them apart by daylight. Jacinda did something foolish next. She lay her head against his chest, listening to the solid beats of his heart. His skin was bare and real and so very alive against her. And her heart answered. Her hands continued to glide over the planes of his back, absorbing his strength.
Awareness hummed in the air. The intimacy of this midnight-embrace far surpassed any they had shared before, and she knew instinctively they had crossed boundaries together they had not meant to. But in the darkness, he was no longer the Duke of Whitley, harsh and unyielding, libidinous rakehell.
Instead, he was just a man. A man who had endured the hells of war and returned home to two wild sisters and a duchy. To false accusations to which he was not even privy. To demons that haunted his sleep.
And for these few, stolen moments, she was just a woman. Not the woman who had been sent to scour his papers for cryptograms. Not the one who betrayed his trust even now by keeping the truth from him. Not a soldier’s widow who had buried herself in her father’s work and her studies.
But a woman who could not stay the swift river of emotion coursing through her. Who could not help but feel his pain and sadness. Who wanted to help him to keep the horrors of his past at bay.
One of his hands traveled to her unbound hair, caressing the strands over her back with a gentleness that destroyed her. He was so much more than she had realized on the day she had first walked into his study.
Everything she wished she could tell him clamored to her tongue.I am not a governess. I have been deceiving you. Sifting through your correspondence. Reporting your words back to another.
What would he do if she revealed all to him? One breath was all it would take, and the truth would come spilling out like an upended tin of loose buttons. Would he send her away immediately? Would he wish to punish her? It was almost certain she would never see him again, and why did that thought leave her with such an empty anguish, a searing pain in her chest?
She should tell him. Regardless of the consequences. She would inform Father of her decision that she was no longer capable of remaining in Whitley’s household and spying against him.
“Tears?” The duke’s voice was a decadent rumble against her ear.
Her cheeks were wet. She wept for the man in her arms. For the impossible duke she did not dare like but whom she nevertheless felt so attuned to. For the broken man who could not sleep for the ghosts that hunted him even in his dreams. For the man who had removed a signet ring from his friend’s disembodied hand so it could be returned to his mother.
Once they began, they would not stop. The tears rained down her cheeks, and she sobbed into his chest, marking his skin with the wetness of her sorrow for him. And she was so very sorry—for Whitley, for what he had experienced and witnessed, for every bit of suffering and anguish he had been forced to endure. He had woken to the horrible, unimaginable knowledge his friend had been tortured and murdered whilst he still lived and breathed.
That was the guilt that ravaged the Duke of Whitley.
It explained why he had become the man he was.
