She would not do that again. Not even for Edward. Not even for the man she loved.
If he wanted her, he would have to come to her. He would have to walk through that door, put down his weapons, and be the man she knew he was.
She could not do it for him. No one could do it for him. This was his battle. The only one that mattered.
She blew out the candle and lay down in the dark, listening to the house settle. Somewhere across the corridor, she could hear him pacing. The steady, measured steps of a man who was fighting with himself.
She pulled the blanket over her shoulders and stared at the fire, trying to understand the man she had married. He was a code she could not crack. A labyrinth she could not navigate. Every time she thought she had found the center, the hedges shifted, the path turned, and she was lost again.
He had said he did not regret marrying her. He had said it twice. He had saidlovein front of the vicar. He had kissed her at the altar with a tenderness that made the entire chapel hold its breath. And then he had sat through the feast with his jaw tight and his eyes distant, and he had come to her room and kissed her palm and said goodnight as though this were any other evening, not the night that was supposed to change everything.
She thought about Gordon. Their wedding night. The locked door. The cold room. The shift on the pillow she refused to touch. She had sat in her wedding dress and counted her breaths, ready to fight.
Hers and Edward’s wedding night was the opposite, and somehow it was just as lonely. Not because he was cruel, but because he was kind. Because his kindness came wrapped in distance, and the distance was killing her.
I will not chase after him again. I will not.
But even as she thought it, she knew it was a lie. She had been chasing him since the gazebo. He was not an arrangement.
He was the thing she had stopped believing existed. A man who saw her. Not her dowry, not her title, not the strategic advantage of her hand. But simply her.
The woman who painted flowers on dead men’s portraits, cheated at relay races, laughed with her whole body when she let herself, and who had spent three years learning how to survive and was only now, slowly, painfully, learning how to live.
The following morning, Edward took breakfast in his room.
Mary told her. Mary, who brought the tea and the toast and the information with the same brisk efficiency she brought everything.
“The Duke requested a tray in his chambers,” she said, setting down the cup. “He told the footman he had correspondence to attend to.”
“Correspondence.”
“That is what he said.”
“On the morning after his wedding.”
“I am merely reporting, Your Grace. I am not editorializing, though I can if you wish.”
“I do not wish.”
“Very well.” Mary set down the toast. “But I will say that if my husband took breakfast in his room on the morning after our wedding, I would have something to say about it. Several things.Loudly.”
“Mary.”
“I am merely making an observation.”
Valeria drank her tea. It tasted like nothing. She thought about going to Edward’s room, knocking on his door, and demanding an explanation. She thought about it for a long time, sitting at the breakfast table alone in the morning light, with the roses from yesterday still on the windowsill and the crumbs from the wedding cake still on the sideboard and the chair across from her empty.
She had wanted to help him. She had wanted to start a family. The thought had surprised her when it first came, somewhere between the masquerade and the night he held her hand while she slept.
A child. His child. She had spent three years convincing Gordon that she could not bear children, and now, for the first time, she wondered what it would feel like to carry one. To hold a boy with Edward’s green eyes. To raise a girl with his stubbornness and her mischief.
It was actually the first time she had wondered what it would be like to be a mother, to raise this man’s children.
The desire was so sharp it frightened her.
But she could not force him. She could not force his mind, his habits, his feelings. He had told her many times this was amarriage of convenience. She had been a fool to believe anything else.
If he wants to remain the Hound for the rest of his life, he can. But I will not be the one to chase after him again.
