Edward’s jaw clenched. “Because I was not supposed to marry a woman I burn to claim.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will ruin everything.” His voice cracked on the words. “Because I cannot think clearly when you are near. Because every moment I spend in your presence, I want more. More of your time. More of your attention. More of you.”
They stood inches apart. Sophia could feel his breath against her skin, could see the way his hands trembled at his sides. His eyes dropped to her mouth again, and she watched him sway toward her, watched his head begin to lower.
Her heart stopped.
He was going to kiss her. Here, in her chambers, with the firelight dancing across the walls and the night stretching endlessly before them. He was going to kiss her, and she was going to let him, and everything would change.
Edward jerked back.
He stepped away from her, his chest heaving, his hands curling into fists. The hunger in his eyes warred with something else. Something that looked like fear.
“Goodnight, Sophia.”
He turned and strode toward the adjoining door. His hand closed on the handle. He paused, his back to her, his shoulders rigid.
For a moment, she thought he might turn around. Might come back to her. Might give in to the fire that blazed between them.
Instead, he opened the door and disappeared into his chambers. The door clicked shut behind him.
Sophia stood alone in the firelight, her robe hanging open, her heart pounding, her body aching with a need she had never known existed.
She pressed her fingers to her lips and wondered what it would take to make him stop running away.
CHAPTER 28
“Will the Duchess be joining you for breakfast, Your Grace?”
Edward glanced up from his newspaper. Hartley stood in the doorway of the breakfast room, his expression carefully neutral.
“I believe Her Grace prefers to take breakfast in her chambers.”
It was not a lie. Sophia had taken breakfast in her chambers every morning since their wedding. Whether by preference or by design, Edward could not say. He only knew that the arrangement suited them both.
Distance. Safety. The careful choreography of two people learning to share a house without sharing a life.
He buried himself in his work. Ledgers and correspondence filled his mornings. Meetings with solicitors and business partners consumed his afternoons. He took his meals at oddhours, timing them to avoid the dining room when Sophia might appear. He walked the corridors with one ear attuned to the sound of her footsteps, ready to turn down a different passage should their paths threaten to cross.
It was exhausting. It was necessary.
Because every time he saw her, he remembered the firelight dancing across her skin. The way her robe had parted to reveal the thin nightgown beneath. The words he had spoken, raw and unguarded, confessing desires he had never meant to voice.
He could not face her. Not yet. Not until he had mastered himself again.
But the house conspired against him.
He emerged from his study one afternoon and found her in the corridor, her hand on the banister, frozen mid-step.
Their eyes met. She wore a simple day dress of pale blue, modest and proper, yet his traitorous mind conjured the image of her in that thin nightgown, the fabric clinging to curves he had no right to notice and the firelight rendering it nearly translucent. He remembered the way she had reached for the sash, prepared to offer herself to him, and how every fiber of his being had screamed at him to accept.
He swallowed hard.
“Your Grace.” She inclined her head.
“Your Grace.” He returned the gesture.
