“Good news travels fast.”
“She’s really gone then?”
“She left at dawn,” Ambrose rasped, his voice like jagged stone. He didn’t look up. “She said it was for the best. For the boys’ future…”
“I am most sorry to hear that.” Morgan stepped forward, his eyes narrowed. “And you’re just going to sit here and sulk?”
“What would you have me do? I’ve bloody well done enough. She is better without me…”
“You’re the Duke of Welton, my good man! You broke into a peer’s house to take her in the first place, and now you’re lettinga piece of parchment tell you what to do? You’re going to just let her leave? Come to your senses!”
“I have come to my senses! She’s right, Morgan,” Ambrose snapped, finally meeting his friend’s gaze with haunted eyes.
“Oh, Ambrose,” he sighed, running a hand through his ruffled hair. “I can see you’ve made up your mind on this, but know you are torn apart inside!”
“If I… If I were to marry her, the world would tear her apart. If I keep her as a mistress, I destroy her soul and her dignity. Lord knows I must do one if she is under my roof, as I cannot bloody keep away from her. I cannot be the thing that breaks her… I do not know much of her past but know she has suffered enough. I will not add to it?—”
“You’re a coward, Ambrose,” Morgan countered, his voice low. “You’re hiding behind your title, some silly sense of propriety, because you’re afraid of what the neighbors will whisper in their drawing rooms.”
“Get out,” Ambrose commanded, the authority in his voice vibrating with a lethal edge. “That is enough. You will remember that you are in my home?—”
“Ambrose. I’m sorry, I just want to make sure you know what you are doing. Please, let me?—”
“I saidget out!” Ambrose roared, standing so quickly his chair toppled over behind him with a crash. “I have a household to run and a replacement governess to find. I don’t have time for your sermons, nor did I ask for them.”
Morgan sighed, a look of something akin to pity in his eyes, as he turned toward the door. “You can find another governess, Welton. But you’ll never find another woman who holds the pieces of your life together like she did. She is your missing link…”
The door shut, and Ambrose picked up the fallen chair, then collapsed back into his seat. He took a deep breath and cursed the air as the scent of Imogen’s sweet lavender soap still haunted it. The perfume served as another reminder of everything he had lost.
Upstairs, silence echoed through the halls, a stark contrast to the happy shouts that had filled the house only days before. He was a Duke, a man of many talents, but in the silence of his study, he had never felt more like a failure. He took the glass of brandy and sipped deeply.
What do I do now?
The brandy burned his empty stomach, but it couldn’t touch the cold that had settled into the marrow of his bones. Ambrose stared at the crumpled parchment until the words blurred into meaningless black ink. He was a man who moved armies of tenants and dictated the flow of capital across a shipping empire, yet he couldn’t find the strength to simply stand up.
The silence of the house was interrupted not by the slamming of the front door, but by a soft, rhythmic thudding overhead. The sound of pacing, little, anxious feet padded across the wooden floors of the nursery above.
Ambrose closed his eyes and rubbed them with his palms, but the darkness offered no relief. A moment later, the heavy oak door of his study creaked. It wasn’t the confident stride of a servant or the boisterous intrusion of Morgan. It was hesitant.
“Uncle?”
Ambrose didn’t move. “Go back to the nursery, Philip. It’s late, and you need your sleep. You know better.”
“We are not trying to be naughty, Uncle. We can’t sleep,” a second voice whispered.
Oh, Arthur.
The two boys drifted into the room like ghosts, looking small and frayed in their matching velvet waistcoats. Their faces were scrubbed clean, but their eyes were red-rimmed and sad.
Ambrose finally looked up, his chest tightening at the sight of them. They looked exactly as they had the day he had fetched them from their mother and father’s funeral, lost, braced for a blow, and utterly alone.
“When is she coming back?” Philip asked. He stepped closer to the desk, his small hands gripping the edge of the mahogany. “She didn’t say goodbye. We know she would say goodbye if she was really leaving!”
Ambrose reached for the brandy glass, then pulled his hand back. He couldn’t do this drunk. “She had to leave, Philip. It was… a matter of her own future.”
“She said she would stay with us,” Arthur cried out.
“Adults make promises they cannot keep, Arthur,” Ambrose said, his voice sharp, yet sounding dead even to his own ears. “Life is… complicated. There are rules. There are?—”
