He took a slow breath. Then another.
“Iwill not make myself into that.”
He stood and moved to his desk, pulling out paper and pen. Then he paused, staring at the blank page.
What should he say? How did he explain seventeen years of damage, of self-imposed exile, of convincing himself that being alone was strength rather than cowardice?
The words wouldn’t come.
Theodore set down the pen and returned to the window. The evening had deepened into night, the city a sprawl of lights that reminded him achingly of standing beside Cressida on the terrace at Ashmere Castle. She’d pointed out constellations she’d learned from her grandmother, her enthusiasm making the familiar stars seem new.
He missed her.
The admission was simple, devastating.
He missed the sound of her voice in the breakfast room. Missed her laughter. Missed the way she’d touch his arm when she wanted his attention, casual and trusting. Missed waking beside her, watching her sleep with her hair spread across the pillow in auburn tangles. Missed the particular quality of her silences, comfortable in a way he’d never experienced with anyone.
Missedher.
And he’d driven her away because facing the fear of losing her had seemed less terrible than the vulnerability of admitting he loved her.
The thought stopped him.
Loved her.
Christ. Helovedher.
The knowledge settled in his chest with the weight of truth too long denied.
He loved her wit, her stubbornness, her refusal to accept his walls as permanent features. He loved how she read with that crease between her eyebrows. How she forgot propriety when she was passionate about some argument. How she’d looked at him after they’d made love, her eyes soft and trusting, like he was someone worth that trust.
He loved her. And he’d done the completely foolish thing and told her she was nothing but a contract.
Theodore gripped the window frame, bile rising in his throat.
What had he done? What had he destroyed because he’d been too frightened to face seventeen years of grief and finally learn that loving someone wasn’t weakness?
The hours stretched ahead, empty and accusing.
He couldn’t write to her; words on paper were insufficient for the magnitude of what he’d done, what he needed to say. He couldn’t go to her parents’ house at this hour, couldn’t pound on their door and demand to see his wife like some character from the Gothic novels she loved.
He could only stand there, whiskey-sick and exhausted, staring out the window and finally understanding what John had tried to tell him.
The safe life he’d built wasn’t life at all.
It was just existence. Cold, careful existence, designed to protect him from pain by ensuring he’d never risk feeling anything real.
And Cressida had threatened that existence simply by being herself. By being kind, and passionate, and determined to see past his defenses to whatever remained of the man he’d been before his family had destroyed itself.
She’d made him want things he’d sworn never to want. Made him imagine a future he’d convinced himself was impossible. Made himhappy.
And he’d repaid her by breaking her heart.
Theodore turned away from the window and looked at Charles’s portrait again. Alone in his study, he let himself feel the full weight of what he’d lost and what he might never get back.
And for the first time in seventeen years, Theodore Yeats, the Duke of Ashmere, allowed himself to weep.
Chapter Thirty-One
