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Adam’s expression was a cross between amusement and confusion. “And you find this troubling.”

Juliet folded her arms, her nose in the air. “I find it unnecessary.”

“Mm.” He tilted his head, the smallest degree. “Am I prickly with you?”

She opened her mouth, and closed it again. “You were,” she said firmly. “At the very beginning. Certainly.”

“And now?”

“Now you are…” she considered it, “intermittently tolerable.”

The corner of his mouth moved. His eyes went briefly lighter at the edges; a thing she had learned to catch because it never completed itself. On Adam Townsend, that was laughter. “Intermittently tolerable,” he repeated.

“It is high praise. I hope you’ll receive it as such.”

He held her gaze, the lamp put its amber warmth across the floor between them, and the house was entirely quiet around them.

His voice went lower, and the lightness in his eyes went with it. “There is something I should have told you before now,” he said. “About…about my previous wife.”

Adam swallowed, his hands bunching into fists. “Are you… comfortable with me talking about her?”

Juliet nodded eagerly. “Please,” she said, her tone soft.

If he wanted to tell her about his previous wife now, then she certainly didn’t want to stop him. The fact that this distant man thought to open himself up to her like this…had her heart pounding hard in her chest.

He did not sit down. He stood near the window with one hand on the frame and spoke.

“Charlotte was eighteen when our fathers arranged the marriage. Her father didn’t approve of the man she loved—the second son of a Derbyshire baron. Our marriage… it was a sensible arrangement. A practical one.

“I had come home one June afternoon and found them in the garden… in a passionate embrace. They hadn’t heard me approach,” he paused. “She didn’t try to deny it, and I didn’t ask her to.”

He looked at the window glass. “I told her only to be careful. For Eloise’s sake. Not because I cared what the ton said, but because Eloise’s future would have to be built in spite of whatever happened between the rest of us.”

“And her lover?” Juliet said.

“Salamanca, the following spring.” A pause. “He did not come home.”

Juliet did not know what to say, so the silence lingered.

“After that,” he said, “she stopped leaving her rooms. Stopped eating properly. I brought physicians. Her sister came from Bath. She would speak with me sometimes, and then she would not.”

He crossed to the chair at her writing table and sat there, forearms on his knees, hands linked. He was not looking at her but at the floor. “I did not know what she needed. I am not certain I had the tools to give it to her even if I had. Eloise was not yet one year old. Too young to understand that her mother was not present.” He stopped on the word, let it sit. “She had the nursemaid. She had me, when I was home.”

He told the rest of it in short, worn lines. “One day, the nursemaid had lost sight of both of them. The staff and I ran out of the house to search. We found Charlotte’s tracks on the path to the lake.” He paused, his gaze fixing on a point across the floor, staring right through the present moment back to that afternoon. “When we finally reached it, the surface of the water was very still in the afternoon sun. Not a ripple.”

A heavy, suffocating silence stretched between them as he swallowed hard, his throat tight.

“Eloise was sitting right there on the bank. Her hands were full of mud, and she was crying.” He stopped then, his jaw locked as the last of the words refused to come, the silence in the room carrying the weight of the rest of it. “And Charlotte was in the water. Drowned.”

When he stopped, Juliet got up from the edge of the bed.

She crossed to him and went down onto one knee before his chair, low enough to be at face level, and took both his hands in hers.

He looked at their joined hands. “Eloise doesn’t know the truth of it,” he said. “I told her Charlotte was ill. That she died of illness.” His fingers moved under hers, once. “It is not entirely a lie.” He turned his hands so his closed around hers instead. “I did not want her to grow up wondering whether her mother had found it easy to leave.”

Juliet held his hands and stayed there with him in it. She did not tell him it was all right. It was not all right. She did not say she was sorry, because he had not told her this in order to be pitied. She stayed, and she held on, and the fire burned steadily at the grate.

“She told me once,” he said, “that we never truly belonged together.” His eyes came back to her face. “She was right. I did not love her. I did my duty by her. I was faithful, I was present, I tried not to shame her publicly. But I did not love her, and I think she knew it.” He held Juliet’s gaze. “I think perhaps that made it easier for her to go. And I have spent six years wondering whether, if I had been a different kind of man, she might have stayed long enough to know her daughter.”