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Her Christian name escaped him almost as a plea. For months, Eliza had asked it of him. She had teased him about it, smiled hopefully whenever he addressed her, patiently waiting for the day he would finally abandon the distance of Duchess, wife, or Your Grace and call her by her name. It had been such a small request, one Arthur had denied her time and again. Not through cruelty. Never that. There had simply been something dangerously intimate about speaking her name aloud, something he had never cared to examine too closely.

Now, when Eliza would surely have given anything not to hear tenderness in his voice, Arthur found himself incapable of calling her anything else. Slowly, she lifted her head and turned towards him, hurriedly wiping at cheeks flushed a painful shade of pink. It was useless. Fresh tears gathered faster than she could brush them away. And her eyes, God, her eyes. Usually so bright with curiosity, so impossibly warm whenever they found him. Now they were red and swollen, and something inside him twisted at the sight.

Arthur’s hands flexed uselessly at his sides, every instinct compelling him to cross the room, to kneel before her, to pull her into his arms and cradle her tear-stained face between his palms until she believed him when he told her that what she had witnessed was not what she thought.

But he remained exactly where he stood. This was the consequence of loving him; she would be the second woman he ended up hurting in his lifetime.

"Was that her?" Eliza whispered.

She pushed herself slowly upright from the dressing table, one hand lingering against its polished edge as though she required it to steady herself. Her movements lacked their usual grace, weighed down by the exhaustion that follows prolonged crying.

Arthur crossed the room almost immediately. The distance between them suddenly felt intolerable.

His boots barely made a sound against the carpet as he approached, stopping only when he stood directly before her. Close enough to reach for her. Close enough to notice the slight quiver in her lower lip that she fought so valiantly to still. His hands remained rigid at his sides, but he wanted nothing more than to hold her.

He knew precisely whom she meant. There was no point pretending otherwise. He had promised her answers. He would not fail her in that now.

"Yes," he answered quietly. "Her name is Sophia."

The truth reached her slowly, passing almost visibly across her features before settling somewhere deep behind her eyes. She closed them, her lashes trembling against cheeks still damp with tears.

"She's beautiful." The words were spoken without bitterness. Without accusation. Only quiet certainty.

His heart sank.

She was not admiring Sophia. She was measuring herself against her.

Christ.

In those few dreadful moments she had stood unseen in the doorway, Eliza had looked at Sophia and found an answer to a question Arthur had never wanted her to ask. This was the woman he had loved. This delicate, fair-haired beauty was what had once captured his heart, and she looked nothing like Eliza.

No. He could not let her believe that.

His hand rose between them before reason had any opportunity to interfere, his fingertips brushing the warmth of her flushed cheek. He stopped there. Would she turn away? God knew she had every right.

To his surprise she did not.

Only then did he allow his palm to cradle her face completely, his thumb sweeping with infinite gentleness across skin still damp with tears, catching another before it could make its lonely path towards her jaw.

"You are so very beautiful, my dearest Eliza," he said quietly, every word carrying a conviction that reached far beyond simple reassurance.

"And I mean that with every inch of my being."

She searched his face desperately, almost painfully, as though willing herself to believe him.

"I am nothing like her," she replied at last, her voice roughened by tears. "She is fair..." Her eyes clouded over, somewhere beyond him, seeing Sophia again as she had stood moments before.

A fragile laugh escaped her, though it held not the slightest trace of amusement.

"The words you speak now..." Her voice faltered, and she pressed her lips tightly together in an effort to regain control before continuing. "How am I supposed to believe them?"

The quiet cruelty of her conclusion confounded him. Somehow, in Eliza’s mind, beauty had become a comparison, as though admiring one woman required diminishing another. Arthur could not understand it. Sophia and Eliza were opposites in almost every imaginable respect. Sophia had the colouring so often immortalised by painters, golden hair that caught the light and delicate hazel eyes that seemed to come alive beneath the sun. Eliza, by contrast, wore midnight curls that refused to be tamed, olive skin that seemed to hold the warmth of summer through every season, and vivid green eyes capable of commanding his attention in any room.

They were as different as the sun and the moon. Each beautiful in a way entirely her own.

Eliza had become the warmth he unconsciously gravitated towards. Somehow, quite without his noticing, her light had reached places within him he had long believed condemned to darkness. She was, in every sense, his sun.

"You gave me your word that you would never take another."