“Ouch, tough crowd.”
“Something is on your mind, and you are avoiding it,” Ambrose said with a raised brow as he finished his brandy and motioned for another. “Out with it, Morgan.”
“I saw Miss Lewis while I was out earlier…” Morgan remarked, his voice smooth and overly casual.
“Did you? And? She is permitted to leave the premises, you know.”
“She looked… worn. Like a lamp burned nearly to the wick. I thought you might wish to know. She was… quite upset.”
“I am… I am sorry to hear that.”
“You would do well to check in on her, especially after how diligently she cared for Lord Philip. And there was also the matter of her running into that viper?—”
“Do not tell me how torunmy household.”
And that was that. Morgan spoke no more on the subject, and they finished their brandies in perfect silence.
Inside the breakfast room, Imogen had heard the distinctive weight of his step. It was the haunting, deliberate cadence that she could now identify through three layers of floorboards and a heavy oak door.
She went silent, the air in her lungs turning to lead, her finger tracing the same line of French text three times without absorbing a single syllable.
When the sound of his retreat finally faded toward the front hall, she let out a breath she had not realized she was holding, her shoulders sagging with a mixture of relief and a devastating, hollow disappointment.
“Miss Lewis? Is the wordle châteauorla château?” Philip asked, tugging at her sleeve with the persistence of a childsensing a lapse in authority. “I am working on this here, but the ending seems so feminine.”
“I am sorry, I was lost in my thoughts for a moment. It is masculine, Philip,” she whispered, her heart hammering a frantic beat against her ribs. She looked at the small boy, like his uncle in the set of his jaw, and felt a wave of dizzying vertigo. “Like everything else in this house, it is bloody unyielding,” she whispered to herself, the bitterness of the realization tasting like copper on her tongue.
The rest of the day passed without consequence, a grueling exercise in performing the role of the composed, invisible governess.
Wednesday followed in much the same way. It was a blur of lessons, walks, and the constant, neck-prickling awareness of Ambrose’s proximity. But by Thursday, the library became the site of a different torture.
Imogen entered the room to return a volume of poetry, choosing the time she knew he was usually at his club, seeking the safety of his absence, much as a small part of her yearned for a chance encounter.
She found the room empty of his person, but the scent of his sharp, clean shaving soap hung heavily in the air, encircling her like a wreath. The room felt charged, as if he had only just stepped through a secret door. Her eyes were drawn, as if by a magnet, to the green leather armchair by the hearth. It still borethe faint, circular indentation on the velvet armrest where his signet ring had pressed into the fabric while he brooded.
He is everywhere in this house…
She felt him in the draft that rattled the window, heard him in the creak of the floorboards, and saw him in every shadow that flickered against the wall. The library, once her sanctuary, had become a temple to his ghost. Before she realized what she was doing, her legs gave way, and she sat on the floor beside the chair, her skirts billowing around her like a dark cloud.
Her fingers trembled as she reached out to trace the indentation on the armrest, her touch feather light, as if she were tracing a lifeline. She hated herself for the desperation of it, for the way she was scavenging for crumbs of a man who was right upstairs.
She rested her cheek against the cool leather, then, closing her eyes and breathing in the essence of him that lingered in the fibers. The coolness was a sharp, grounding contrast to the feverish heat rising in her skin. She imagined, just for a heartbeat, that his hand was resting on her hair instead of the mahogany frame. She stayed there, suspended in a state of agonizing, beautiful grief, until the grandfather clock chimed the hour.
The sound was a cold splash of reality, a reminder that she was the ghost in this scenario, not him. She was a phantom in a house that belonged to a man she could never truly touch, and perhaps no one could.
He was a Duke, a sovereign of his own world, and she was merely a tenant of his mercy.
What a shame, she thought,that such a vast capacity for tenderness was locked behind the bars of a title.
And with that intimate moment of surrender, her yearning became a living thing, a restless, prowling creature pacing the narrow hallways between their rooms, waiting for the sun to set so it could hunt for him again in the dark.
That evening, they met by accident on the landing.
A candle in Imogen’s hand flickered, casting long, dancing shadows against the wood paneling. Ambrose was dressed for a ball he clearly did not want to attend, evidenced by his grunting. His cravat was tied with clinical perfection that masked his inner turmoil.
“Your Grace,” she murmured, flattening herself against the wall to let him pass. “Good evening to you.”
Ambrose stopped short. The space between them was barely a foot, yet it felt like a canyon. He looked at her, really looked at her. For a second, the Duke of Welton vanished, and he was only Ambrose.
