He did not dare elaborate. Northwich was an intelligent man. He could surmise the rest. Adrian would not insult Tilly by expounding. He could scarcely reconcile what had happened himself. It had been miraculous and wonderful and terrifying all at once. He’d risen that morning, determined not to allow their lovemaking to soften him toward her. But she was still there, dwelling in his heart. Just where she had always been. Time apart, betrayal, prison—nothing had excised her.
Nothingwouldexcise her.
“Sheremained.” Northwich repeated his words.
“Yes.”
“You bedded her.”
“Damnation, Northwich, you are speaking of my wife,” he grumbled.
“And attempting to make sense of your riddles. So. Yea or nay to the question?”
He took another swallow of his brandy before continuing. “Yea.”
Northwich quirked a brow. “Against your will?”
His ears were damned well boiling. “No.”
“Ah. Then I fail to see the problem.”
He scowled at his friend. “The problem is that I do not dare trust her, and yet we are wed scarcely any time, and already she is finding the weakness in my armor. All the places where she may easily slip her dagger, the better to fell me.”
“A hyperbole, that.” Northwich drained the rest of his brandy and asked for another before continuing. “I have met your wife, you will recall. She hardly seems the murderous sort. Quite the opposite, in fact. She seems to care for you.”
His friend had often exhibited misgivings whenever he spoke of Tilly’s role in his being sent to prison. “You are so willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Why?”
Northwich shrugged. “Why not? Here are the more salient questions. What has she done to prove herself unworthy? Why doyoudoubt her? Have you evidence of her guilt, beyond your suspicions she was complicit?”
Had he evidence?
Adrian swirled the brandy in his glass, thinking, always returning to the one fact he could not ignore, regardless of how much he wished to. “The ring. How else would Longleigh have known of it?”
“There is a possibility some of the servants were reporting back to him, or that he received the bill from the jeweler, is there not?”
Doubt returned, joining the lingering questions already residing within him. What if Northwich was right? Had he been wrong to believe her guilty of aiding Longleigh in the plot to see him sent to Dunsworth? Part of him hoped that was so.God, he hoped it. And wished it.
He had learned well that life was nothing more than a series of disappointments, followed by pain, disillusionment, and more disappointments. Aside from Robby, that was. He was deuced fortunate to be a father. To have a beautiful baby son who was a miraculous gift from the heavens, who hugged him tight and clapped his hands wildly and who regularly chewed on his toys as if they were his dinner. Robby was the best damned thing that had come out of this miserable life of his.
What if Robby was not the only good thing, however? What if Tilly was, too?
What if everything he had believed for the last year and a half had been wrong?
“Those are possibilities I had not considered,” he allowed at last.
Northwich passed a hand over his jaw, his expression turning contemplative. “Do you know what I think, old chap?”
“I hope it does not involve opium and man-eating dragons,” he attempted to joke, trying to distract from the heaviness of the moment and the unease roiling through his gut.
The duke grinned. “Not this time. It involves you and that bloody dreadful emotion all the poets are always writing about.”
“Love.” He sighed heavily.
“That would be the one. You are in love with your wife.”
Yes, he was. He always had been. He could not discern the moment he had first fallen in love with her in Derbyshire. Perhaps when she had shown him the hidden fountain in the great hall, or when they reached the conservatory and the blooms were rich and lustrous, the air perfumed with ripening fruit and exotic blossoms. Mayhap that day in the boat when he had lain beside her and they had kissed. The precise second, the minute, the hour, the day did not matter. For just as he had realized last night when her lips had met his, his heart had not forgotten.
It was still hers.
