"And you feel unwell now?" she asked, searching his face for signs she might have missed—pallor beneath his tan, shadows beneath his eyes.
He nodded again, his expression carefully controlled. "Sometimes. The episodes come and go."
June's hands gripped her teacup so tightly she feared the delicate china might shatter. This morning, she had run from their wedding out of fear—fear of a loveless match, of an uncertain future. How petty those concerns seemed now, faced with the knowledge that the future she dreaded might be cruelly brief.
The thought filled her with a terror far greater than any she had known before.
Twenty-Two
June stared at Dominic, her teacup forgotten between her trembling fingers. The word "episodes" echoed in her mind like a death knell. Not some vague future threat, then, but something real, something happening now.
Her husband of mere hours was already experiencing the symptoms that had claimed his father, his grandfather, generations of Blake men. The knowledge settled into her chest with painful weight, constricting her breathing until she had to force herself to inhale.
"It might be nothing," she said finally, the words sounding hollow even to her own ears. "Perhaps you're merely overworked, or?—"
"June." Dominic's voice was gentle, but it cut through her desperate rationalizations like a blade. "I know what I feel. I have seen it before."
She set down her teacup, afraid she might drop it. "Tell me more about these... episodes."
Dominic leaned back in his chair, his long fingers drumming absently on the arm. "They come without warning. My heart seems to forget its purpose—it races, then stops, then races again. Sometimes my vision darkens at the edges. I feel a pressure in my chest, as if something is squeezing the very life from me."
"And there's no treatment?" June asked, clinging to the faintest hope. "Surely medical science has advanced since your father's time."
A sad smile crossed Dominic's face. "My mother consulted every physician in England after my father died. Specialists from Edinburgh to Paris examined me throughout my youth. They found nothing they could name, nothing they could cure." He shrugged, the casual gesture at odds with the grave subject. "It's like a family curse, I suppose. Few of the past dukes have lived past five-and-thirty, and none past forty."
June's mind raced through calculations. Dominic was thirty now. Five years, perhaps ten at most. The brevity of it stole her breath.
"And you truly believe your days are numbered?" she asked, unable to keep the slight quaver from her voice.
"I know they are." His blue eyes held hers with startling intensity. "As are all of ours, I suppose, though some with more precision than others."
She looked down at her hands, noting with distant surprise that she had twisted her new wedding ring around her finger so tightly that the skin beneath was white. "Why tell me this now? You could have let me live in ignorance, at least for a while."
Dominic rose from his chair and moved to the window, his broad shoulders silhouetted against the fading daylight. "Because I don't wish to waste the time I have with fights and unspoken confessions. I have lived too long keeping people at a distance." He turned to face her, his expression more open than she had ever seen it. "If my time is to be short, I want to spend it savoring every moment."
The raw honesty in his voice made something shift inside June's chest—a softening, a yielding.
"Is that why you rejected me?" she asked quietly. "At Oxford, all those years ago?"
Dominic's eyes widened slightly, as if surprised by her directness. "Yes," he admitted after a moment. "Though I wasn't entirely conscious of it at the time." He crossed back to the table, taking the seat beside her rather than across. "I was three-and-twenty when I first understood what my bloodline meant—that I would likely die young, that any wife I took would be widowed before her time. I made a vow then to never marry, to never inflict that fate on a woman I cared for."
"So you pushed away anyone who showed interest?"
"Every time," he said, his voice dropping lower. "Including a bright-eyed girl with a passion for ancient texts and a smile that haunted me for years afterward."
June's heart skipped a beat at his words, at the way his eyes held hers as he spoke. "I wasn't very bright-eyed after that day," she murmured.
"No, I imagine not." Regret shadowed his features. "I was unnecessarily cruel. For that, I am truly sorry."
The apology, so simply offered, soothed a wound June had carried for years. She found herself wanting to share something in return, to match his vulnerability with her own.
"I was mocked often as a child," she said, the words emerging before she could reconsider. "For being bookish, for preferring libraries to ballrooms. When I first visited August at Oxford, I was entranced by the library there. I told my friends about it—how grand it was, how it smelled of leather and wisdom, how I'd found texts on Roman architecture that no one had touched in decades."
She paused, the memory still capable of stinging after all these years.
"They laughed at me," she continued. "Said I would die a spinster if I couldn't converse on more appropriate topics. Thatno gentleman wanted a wife who could translate Latin better than he."
Dominic's hand found hers on the table, warm and steady. "Your friends were foolish."
