She put the candle on the writing table. When she turned back, her mouth was pressed flat, and her chin was up.
“Why are you so insistent on keeping me at a distance?” She stepped forward once. “You kissed me…more than once. And not just that… You—” She stopped herself, cheeks flaming, and drew a breath. “Why?”
“I never gave marriage much serious thought.” He tightened his grip on the back of the armchair, trying his best to sound as uninterested as he possibly could. But he could hear it from his own tone: that it wasn’t working very well. “The situation arose, and?—”
“You are a duke.” Her brows lifted. “Heirs have never been an afterthought for men in your position.”
“I know that.” He kept his eyes on the middle distance. “I also know I wouldn’t make a good husband…or a good father. Look how I am with James…and James is young, and he is—he’ll grow into the title considerably better than I ever managed. He will inherit the title.”
She looked at him. Her head tilted very slightly to one side. “What happened to you,” she said, “to make you think so little of yourself?”
His shoulders went rigid.
“Is this about Lucien?” she said. “He’ll come around. He was shocked. That’s all it is.”
“It’s not about Lucien.”
“What am I to you, then?” she said. “If not a wife.”
“You are my wife.”
“That is what the register says. It isn’t an answer.”
“We can be amicable,” he said. “Civil. There is no reason we couldn’t be friends.”
“Friends.” She said the word without moving. “Is that what we were when you kissed me? When you touched me in that garden—” She stopped.
“I won’t touch you again, if that’s what you want.”
“And if it isn’t what I want?” She stepped closer. She was four feet from him now, near enough that he could see the candle’s light in her eyes. “What then? We take lovers?”
“Don’t say that.” The words came out harder than he’d intended.
She did not step back. “Why do you behave one way and then another? You’ve made me feel—” She stopped again. Then quieter: “Why?”
He ran a hand through his hair and sat down on the edge of the bed.
The fire had burned low. Outside, the street was still. No carriage, no footstep on the pavement below, no sound from next door that might be Lucien awake at his desk, composing anything with a capital S.
Annabelle looked at him. Then she came and sat down beside him, a foot between them, her hands folded in her lap, and she waited.
He had told no one. Not Miles, who had been his friend for eight years, and not even Lucien, who had been his friend for ten. He had carried it with the specific efficiency of a man who had learned early that some things did not survive being said aloud.
“You deserve the truth,” he said. “After what I’ve put you through. At least that.”
She waited.
“My mother played every evening,” he said. “In the music room downstairs. She was genuinely gifted, not in the way people sayto be polite about a woman who plays tolerably well. She could play anything she had heard once through. She performed at events before her marriage, and men your brother’s age still spoke of it years after.” He looked at his hands. “My father resented it. Her talent. The attention it brought her. So… he drank. At least, I think that’s why.”
She did not move.
“When I was nine, he came home one night. I was at the top of the stairs. I used to stay up past my bedtime to hear her play through the floor.” He stopped. Took a breath and continued. “She was in the middle of something when he came through the door. I heard him go to the music room. I heard him shouting at her, about her music, about the men who attended her performances, about things he had invented.” The back of the armchair was still in his line of sight. He focused on it. “She tried to talk him down. She was good at that. And then… there was a sound I hadn’t heard before.”
He stopped, wincing.
“And then it was quiet.”
Annabelle’s hand came down over his, her warmth a comfort he did not realize he’d been starving for. He looked at it, his gaze blurring at the edges.
