He could. He chose not to.
Because the nursery was not a room. It was a door. And on the other side of it waited everything Evander had spent fourteen years building walls against.
Attachment. Need. The particular love that made a man pour himself into a bottle when it was taken from him, the way his father had poured himself into brandy the day they buried his mother and never climbed back out.
Evander’s father had loved his wife. That was the part no one spoke of. The old Duke of Blackholm had not been a villain. He had been a man who loved too much and broke when that love was gone, and the breaking had lasted twelve years and destroyed everything it touched.
Evander would not break. He would not allow himself the kind of love that could break him. He would protect Tommy. He would provide for Mary. He would fulfill every obligation hisname demanded. But he would do it from a distance, because distance was the only thing that had ever kept him whole.
He returned to the ledger. The numbers made sense. Numbers always did.
“Your Grace?”
Mrs. Bridwell’s voice came from somewhere far away. Evander blinked. He stood in the nursery doorway at half past eleven at night, and he did not remember walking here.
The nursemaid sat up in the rocking chair, blinking sleep from her eyes. The single candle on the side table had burned to a stub, its flame guttering. Tommy slept in the crib, his breathing slow and even.
Mary slept in the armchair beside him.
She had curled into the chair the way a child curls into a hiding place, her legs tucked beneath her, her head resting against the wing. One hand hung over the arm of the chair, her fingers near the edge of the crib, as though she had fallen asleep reaching for the baby. Her hair was unpinned, loose around her shoulders. Her face in sleep was younger than it was in waking; the sharpness softened, the composure dissolved into something unguarded.
“How long has she been asleep?” Evander asked. He kept his voice low.
“An hour, perhaps. She wouldn’t leave, Your Grace. He was fussy after his ten o’clock feeding, and she settled him, and then she just…” Mrs. Bridwell gestured at the chair. “I didn’t have the heart to wake her.”
Evander crossed the room. A knitted throw lay folded over the back of the rocking chair. He picked it up, shook it open, and draped it over Mary. He tucked the edge around her shoulder the way he had once tucked blankets around Richard after carrying their father to bed.
The gesture came from the same place. Muscle memory. The instinct to cover what was vulnerable.
Mary stirred. Her lips parted. She murmured something that sounded like a name, and Evander stepped back before she could surface enough to see him.
He looked at Tommy. The baby lay on his back with his fists above his head, surrendered to sleep. His face was round and untroubled. Richard’s brow. Charlotte’s nose. A child built from the two people who had left the most wreckage behind them.
Something moved in Evander’s chest. Not the tightening he had felt in the corridor that afternoon. Something deeper. A pull, low and persistent, like a tide he could not see but could feel shifting the ground beneath him.
He turned from the crib.
There was work to do. Richard to find. A duchy to manage. A scandal to contain. He had correspondence waiting in his study, a report from the Bow Street runner to review, and a list of debts Richard had left behind that grew longer with every inquiry. He did not have time to stand in a nursery at midnight, watching a woman sleep beside a baby that was not hers, feeling things he had no right to feel.
He nodded to Mrs. Bridwell and left the room. His footsteps were quiet on the corridor runner. He did not look back.
Downstairs, he collected his greatcoat from the stand in the entrance hall. Harding appeared, as he always did, and held the door without comment.
The night air hit Evander’s face, cold and bracing, and he walked to the waiting carriage, and the door of Blackholm House closed behind him, and inside, the woman he had married slept in a chair beside the child he would not hold, and the house held them both in his absence the way it always did.
The way he could not.
CHAPTER 8
“Do you think he knows my voice?”
Mrs. Bridwell looked up from the linen she was folding. Tommy lay in Mary’s arms, his eyes half-closed, his mouth working around the edge of his fist.
Ten days old. Ten days of bottles and burping and baths and the small, relentless work of keeping a human being alive.
“He knows your voice better than anyone’s, Your Grace.”
“Better than his mother’s?”
