And the pain of it, the specific, precise pain of watching Evander walk out of her room after offering her everything except himself, told Mary what she had been circling for weeks.
She was in love with him.
She was in love with him, fully and completely, the way a person is in love when the absence of the other feels like a missing limb and the presence of them feels like coming home. And the man she loved had just told her, in the kindest and most devastating way possible, that he would give her a child, but not his heart.
Mary sat on the edge of the bed. She pressed her hands against her knees, stared at the floor, and breathed until the shaking stopped.
She could rage against that. She could storm into his study and demand that he tear the walls down, and perhaps the fury would crack something loose, and perhaps it would only drive him further behind the stone.
Or she could accept what he offered.
A child. A family. His presence, but not his heart. The warmth of his body beside hers, the partnership of raising whatever children might follow, the life of a duchess who was cared for in every material way, but loved in none.
Mary pressed her palms harder against her knees.
It was not enough. She knew that. A marriage without love was the arrangement Evander had proposed in a parlor six weeks ago, and Mary had spent every day since watching it become something more, and settling for less would be a betrayal of everything they had built.
But a marriage without Evander was worse.
She stood. She washed her face. She pinned her hair. She went to the nursery and took Tommy from Mrs. Bridwell and spent the rest of the morning walking the corridors with the baby on her shoulder, humming melodies that had no words, and she did not go downstairs.
CHAPTER 25
“Hold still, Tommy. I cannot wash what I cannot catch.”
Mary bowed beside the basin in the nursery, Tommy propped between her hands, his legs kicking at the warm water with the fury of a baby who had just discovered splashing.
Water arced over the rim and soaked the front of her dress. She reached for the linen cloth on the changing table without looking up.
A hand held it out to her. The wrong way.
Mary startled. Evander stood beside the changing table with a folded towel over his arm and the square of linen pinched between two fingers, offering it the way one might offer a dead mouse.
“You are holding the cloth wrong,” she said.
“Mrs. Bridwell told me it was bath time.” He turned the cloth over in his hand, found no improvement, and held it out again. “I came to help.”
Mary took the cloth from him. She studied his face for a long moment, searching for the catch. The last time they had spoken, he had offered her a child and withheld himself in the same sentence, and she had spent the rest of the day refusing to be in the same room with him.
“You want to help,” she repeated.
“I want to help.”
Evander kneeled beside the basin and dipped his hands into the water. Tommy stared at him with solemn interest. Mary handed him the cloth, and he began washing Tommy’s arm, gently, copying the motion he had watched her do through a dozen doorways.
When the cloth reached Tommy’s fingers, the baby grabbed it and stuffed a corner into his mouth.
“That is not food,” Evander said.
Tommy sucked harder.
“He does that with everything,” Mary said. The edge of a smile tugged at her mouth, reluctant but real. “Mrs. Bridwell’s cap. Mypearls. The corner of his blanket. If it fits in his mouth, it belongs in his mouth.”
“A man of conviction.” Evander eased the cloth free from Tommy’s grip and wrung it out. “I respect that.”
Mary lifted Tommy from the basin, and Evander wrapped the towel around him. The baby emerged damp and indignant, his face scrunching in protest at the cold air, and Mary held him against her chest while Evander tucked the towel around his shoulders. Their hands brushed over the baby’s back. Mary’s fingers were warm and wet, and the contact was brief, and neither of them pulled away.
They dressed Tommy together. Evander held the clean gown while Mary guided her arms through the sleeves, and they worked in a silence that held none of the frost of the past day. It held something else. An awareness. The quiet acknowledgment of two people doing a small, ordinary thing that felt, for reasons neither could name, like the most important thing in the world.
