Evander’s hand slid from her cheek into her hair. Mary’s fingers gripped the lapels of his coat tighter, and his mouth moved against hers with a gentleness that made her chest ache.
The corridor disappeared, and the night disappeared, and the only thing that existed was the press of his body against hers. The warmth of his breath, the sound he made, low and quiet, when she pulled him closer.
Tommy’s cry split the silence.
They pulled apart. Mary’s hands released his coat. Evander’s hand dropped from her hair. They stood inches apart, breathing hard, their foreheads nearly touching, and the baby’s wail climbed from the nursery and filled the corridor.
“Go,” Evander said. His voice was rough. “He needs you.”
Mary opened her mouth. There were things she wanted to say, questions that pressed against her teeth, words that would not wait for morning.
But Tommy’s cry rose again, sharper this time, and the pull of it was stronger than anything else.
She touched Evander’s face. One brief press of her palm against his jaw. Then, she turned and walked to the nursery, and she did not look back, because looking back would mean stopping.
And stopping was not something she could afford.
CHAPTER 23
“Five o’clock. Just wonderful.”
Evander sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the clock on the mantelpiece.
He had slept for two hours, maybe less. The ceiling had occupied the rest of his night, along with the ghost of Mary’s mouth on his and the press of her palm against his jaw in a dark corridor.
He touched his lips. Dropped his hand. Stood.
The washstand was cold. He splashed water on his face, gripped the edge of the basin, and looked at his reflection in the mirror above it.
Tired eyes. Stubbled jaw. The face of a man who had spent the night driving to Sussex and back, finding his brother, absorbing a revelation that upended everything he had believed for weeks…
And then kissing his wife in a corridor as though she were the only solid thing left in a world that had come unmoored.
Love.
That was the word for it.
The word he had spent fourteen years barricading himself against, the word that had destroyed his father and driven Richard into hiding and sent Charlotte fleeing from a pregnancy she could not face alone.
Love had done all of this. Love had tangled four lives into a knot that Evander was now expected to untie, and the cruelest part was that the same force that had created the mess was now pulling him toward Mary with a gravity he could no longer pretend did not exist.
He dressed. He buttoned his waistcoat, knotted his cravat, and pulled on his boots.
“Control in all things,” he whispered to himself.
The morning would require precision, and precision required that the man who walked downstairs look like a duke.
Even if the man inside the clothes had spent the night falling apart.
He reached the kitchen and cleared his throat before speaking.
“Mrs. Cahill. A word.”
The housekeeper looked up from the kitchen worktable, where she was reviewing the day’s menus with the cook.
The kitchen staff stood at attention around the room: two footmen, three maids, the scullery girl, and Harding, who had appeared at the kitchen door the moment he heard Evander’s footsteps on the stairs.
“All of you, listen.” Evander stood in the center of the kitchen with his hands clasped behind his back. “My brother is back home. He arrived last night, and he is currently in my study. This information does not leave these walls. Not to the tradesmen. Not to your families. Not to anyone outside this household.”
