And yet he left each night, as if his own house could not contain him.
Eleanor rose quietly, crossing to the window.
Outside, the grounds were dark. A lantern moved briefly in the distance, then vanished.
She pressed her fingers to the glass, her breath fogging it.
She had married a duke she did not know.
A man who kept rules like walls.
A man with secrets tucked into the attic and into the hours after midnight.
And Eleanor, Duchess of Langford, stood in her nightgown watching the darkness beyond Blackmere Park, realizing that the only thing more frightening than a husband who might be unfaithful was a husband who might be doing up to something far worse.
CHAPTER 12
James did not expect the silence to feel like an intrusion.
Blackmere Park should have been orderly. It should have been familiar. It should have breathed to his rhythm, not the other way around. Yet when he pushed open the study door, the room met him with a wrongness he could not name at first.
The air smelled faintly of soap.
Not ink and wax. Not leather and paper. Soap.
He stopped in the threshold.
His desk had been cleared.
Not of documents, exactly. The papers still existed, neatly stacked. But they had been moved. The inkwell sat at a different angle. His penknife was aligned with the blotter as thoughsomeone had decided symmetry mattered more than function. The chair was tucked in, the rug brushed, the curtains drawn back to a uniform fold.
Even the fire had been tended so carefully it looked staged.
James’s jaw tightened.
He stepped inside slowly, as if the room might prove less offensive if he approached it with caution.
It did not.
A faint sound came from the side table. A soft clink of porcelain.
Eleanor stood near the window with a cloth in her hand, a small pile of books beside her, as though she had been in the middle of putting the world into order when he arrived to interrupt it.
She looked up.
For a brief moment she seemed pleased, as though she expected praise.
James felt something cold settle behind his ribs.
“What,” he said, voice quiet, “have you done?”
Eleanor blinked. “I cleaned.”
He stared at her.
“You cleaned,” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said, as though it were obvious. “It was… dirty.”
