“No, Your Grace. And no, I am not married.”
“Why not?”
“I... I never had the inclination.”
Ambrose nodded. “Smart fellow. Wives are the burden of those who must produce a legitimate heir.”
Humphrey’s mouth opened. Closed.
“Speak,” he ordered, taking note of the small, inconspicuous movement. Not unlike a fish on land gasping for breath.
“That’s not to say I don’t want a wife,” the butler said slowly. “But given the demands of my duties, which I am happy and proud to fulfill, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to... to...”
“I haven’t all afternoon, Humphrey.”
“To find a woman that I love.”
Love.How Ambrose despised that word. Deep down in his bones, where his marrow resided, he loathed it.
For his entire childhood, he’d chased after it. For his entire adulthood, he’d run away from it.
Now here he was, seeking counsel from hisbutler.
Where had it all gone wrong?
When you decided that it was better to be alone than to place your faith in another human being for fear that they would hurt and betray you as your father had done. Because it’s not Mara that you’re protecting. It’s yourself. And knowing that you would be unable to give her the one thing she genuinely wanted, you never should have married her to begin with. But you did, because you’re a selfish bastard who didn’t want anyone else to have her, and then you banished her here, to this castle, where—
“Shut up,” he growled.
“I—I didn’t say anything, Your Grace.”
“Not you, Humphrey.”
“Ah—”
“Never mind.” He gave an impatient jerk of his arm. “If you’ve never been married, then you cannot give me the advice that I seek. You are dismissed, Humphrey.”
“It’s true that I’ve yet to have the good fortune of being married, but with all due respect, Your Grace... neither have you.”
“What’s he talking about?” Ambrose grumbled under his breath after the butler had left. “Iammarried. I’ve been married for two damn years and have the wife to prove it.”
But did he?
Did he really?
He had a wife, that much was true.
A wife he’d pushed away, ignored, and tried his best to forget. A wife who was planning to have an affair. A wife who made his blood burn like no other woman ever had.
“HUMPHREY!” he yelled again, except this time it wasn’t the butler that responded, but rather another person in his life he’d taken great pains to avoid. And the sight of her face—older, more weathered, but just as kind as it had been when he was a lost, lonely little boy—shot a pang of some unidentifiable emotion straight through his cold, withered heart. “Agnes. You... you look well.”
“I lookold,” she corrected him, wrinkles fanning out from the corners of her eyes as she smiled. “It’s been a long time, Your Grace, since ye have come tae visit us here and stayed more than a night. I’m happy tae see ye.”
When he was a lad, Agnes had been a young scullery maid. Nearly as far down on the servant hierarchy as one could get. Since then, she’d risen to housekeeper and, occasionally, lady’s maid. The lady’s maid of a duchess, and that placed her shoulder to shoulder with Humphrey, but still far, far below even the lowest titled gentry.
Ambrose and Agnes were on opposite ends of a wide, often cruel spectrum that separated those who had from those who had not. But as he stood there, gazing at the woman who had been more of a mother to him than his own, Ambrose found that nothing divided them but his own ungratefulness and detachment from anyone who meant anything.
“I apologize,” he said hoarsely, causing Agnes’s brow to crease.
