Love, Cordy.
But she didn’t trust her heart any longer. It thumped for a man that didn’t need her.
Always, she had thought themselves well matched. Their tempers may flare and clash, but a more delicate woman would have shrivelled beneath Alex’s fierceness. Equally he didn’t back down from her pert words and brashness.
But none of that mattered. Because ultimately, the duke did not need her.
He had his vocation, his two friends – if you counted Jack – and his title. But he didn’t needher, didn’t need a wife. He’d tried to explain this once before, at the Bucklands’ soirée, but she’d thought him dissembling.
Previous to their marriage, his life may have been lonely, but he’d been comfortable and content with only himself to worry about. He may “enjoy” her company and be “attracted” to her body, but it only added complication and strain to his life.
She disobeyed his rules and caused him to fear and ultimately…
He didn’t need her.
He didn’t love her.
“Yes, Alexander. I do understand you,” she said softly.
∞∞∞
As the carriage clattered to Whitehall, so Aideen’s last words clattered in Rakecombe’s skull.
For God’s sake, he knew hidden meaning when he heard it, but for the life of him, he couldn’t decipher what she meant.
This morning he’d acted a beetle-headed arse, he knew that.
He gritted his teeth and exhaled heavily as London flew by the carriage window, his thoughts as dull as the weather – no rain, just the dreary grey that England seemed to specialise in.
Yesterday, after the Southwark jaunt and the patching up of Winterbourne, he’d headed to Bluey’s house to impart his thanks but ended up staying for supper, aware he might have been… He hesitated to say hiding.
Whenever he beheld his wife, a savage desperation arose to ask Madame Chevrolet, the extortionately expensive modiste, to permanently double-stitch Aideen to his side, finishing with a quadruple knot.
But all that kept tumbling over him every moment of the night and day when not with her was the fear and numbness he’d felt on hearing that scream and thinking her dead. Then, swift on its heels came the fact she’d saved his life, with a bloody lady’s muff pistol…in poppy-red enamel.
Last night, he hadn’t meant to visit her bedchamber, but he’d needed to touch her, to see she was safe. He laughed, a mocking tribute.
But then he’d been unable to get close enough, unable to hold her enough, unable to love her enough.
Dawn had broken, and she’d looked exhausted, so he’d left the warm bed, but over breakfast his thoughts had still been a hotchpotch jumble of turmoil, and he’d barely managed a grunt in response to her words, hardly tasted the food he’d shovelled into his mouth and hadn’t read a word of the newspaper.
She’d disobeyed every rule on his list…except for the carriage and footmen.
She’d put her life in danger.
She’d potentially saved a child’s life.
Shehadsaved his bloody life.
She could shoot better than he could.
The very characteristics he loved about her, he had sought to supress with that futile list – her caring, her boldness, her strength. But to have Aideen and all those attributes close also meant living with the possibility of losing her. Or likewise, the possibility of his duchess losing him…
All of which had kept him silent over breakfast.
Part shame. Part Gwen. Part confusion.
What an arse he was.
