“I cannot believe that you have never told me that.”
“It is quite shameful,” she confessed. “I know that you are aware of my family’s situation, but it still does not make it any easier to talk about things. Even I forget just how dire things became.”
“I do not find it shameful. I find it admirable that you were able to do all of these things by yourself.”
“Well, you would be the first to see it that way.”
“And I am more than happy to be if it means that you do not see yourself as a commoner without class forever.”
Jackie appreciated his kindness, but she did not know how to handle the attention that he was giving her about her life back home. She forgot, at times, just how bizarre it truly was.
“Are you not joining the hunt?” she asked. “The nobility is supposed to.”
“I never have,” he explained. “I have never had a desire to kill for sport. The very idea seems cruel to me, especially when there are so many other ways to spend my time.”
It was then that Jackie realized how the duke treated others in general. Lady Ophelia had appeared out of nowhere, and he could have sent her away in an instant, but he had not shamed her. He was good to animals that could not help themselves. He was a good man, and it was a shame that nobody was able to see it given that he did not leave his estate.
His scars affected him greatly, she knew that—or rather, the way others perceive them did, and she felt almost guilty about it. She knew that he deserved far better than to be hidden away. Scars did not fade entirely, and so this would be his life for as long as he allowed it to be.
And she would possibly be his wife.
Could she make peace with that? Could she be happy to have a husband that avoided the outside world while she wanted to see as much of it as possible? To her surprise, she decided she could. Philip was a good man, whom she liked a lot, and against all odds she was attracted to him. It was more than she could have hoped for upon her arrival.
“What did you expect you would be doing right now?” She asked, albeit clumsily.
“In what sense?”
“In the sense that… well, when I was a girl, and my mother was still alive, I dreamed of marrying and adventuring, just like in my books. We were never the most affluent family, but I sometimes wonder if I could still have had the means to if she had not passed, or if my father had not squandered it all.”
“That is a dream that you can still achieve one day.”
Jackie smiled, but she knew it would not be the case if they married. She could not very well travel alone, and it was clear that he would not accompany her.
“I suppose,” he continued, “I always wanted to be more like my father.”
“Lady Ophelia told me that it is a shame that I shall never meet him, and that he was wonderful.”
“He certainly was. He had this charisma that worked on everyone, no matter who they were. My mother told me once that the Queen herself called him a charmer—the Queen! I thought that I could do the same, threading that needle that he did so deftly, so that I was not known as a rake.”
“You were certainly never seen as that.”
“No, only ever as a recluse.”
She looked at him, his face fallen, and placed a hand on his sleeve.
“You need not ever tell me what happened to you,” she said gently. “I can see in your eyes just how much you lost without needing words to understand.”
“Do you truly not know?”
Jackie shook her head. There had been gossip about him, of course, but it had never been anything about how it had happened, only the aftermath. It was true, they referred to him as a scarred recluse that refused to see anyone, but there was never anything further beyond speculation.
“My apologies. I truly thought everyone was aware of it.”
“Others may be, but I never asked. It did not matter to me, for I tend not to meddle in the affairs of others.”
“Then I shall rectify that for you. It is not something that I am ashamed of. You see, years ago now, my father and I werereading in his study late at night. My mother came in, asking the two of us to go to bed, but we knew better than she did.”
He laughed sadly at that.
