She Forgot the Duke Who Broke Her Heart… Then Fell in Love With Him Again

Chapter 13

He did not answer at once. He looked at Hollis — who had come in at some point and was standing by the door like a piece of furniture — and Hollis looked back, and something passed between them that had clearly passed a hundred times before.

“Leave us,” Adrian said.

The room emptied. Hannah went last, and at the door she turned and gave the Duke a look that Cecily could not read and never forgot — not hostile, not warm. The look of a woman who has been keeping a secret for four years and has just handed the key to somebody else.

The door closed.

“Sit down,” Cecily said. “You are the one who is grey now.”

Adrian Ashford sat down at a kitchen table in a fishing village, and put both hands flat on the wood, and told her.

“You told me you wished to visit your aunt,” he said. “In the north. That you would be gone a fortnight.”

“I have no aunt.”

“No. I know that now. I have written to every relation you have, and there is no aunt, and there never was.” He looked at his own hands. “I do not know where you were going. I have spent three weeks trying to discover it, and I cannot.”

Cecily watched him.

“You told Hollis to have the carriage brought round at midnight,” Adrian said. “You took one small case and a sewing box. You left a note on my desk.”

“What did it say?”

“It said, I have gone to my aunt’s. Do not follow me.”

The fire popped.

“And you did not follow her.”

“I did not follow you,” he said. “You had asked me not to.”

Cecily stood up and went to the window, because she could not sit still with that.

“You asked for space,” Adrian said behind her. “And I gave it to you. That is not a defence. It is the charge.”

“Why?”

“Because I have been taught, since I was six years old, to do the correct thing.” His voice was very flat. “You were correct. You wanted room. I gave you room. I wrote to your aunt’s address and the letter came back undelivered, and I told myself you had simply gone somewhere else, and I waited, as a reasonable man waits, for my wife to come home.”

He paused.

“Eleven days later a man came to the house and told me the carriage had been found at the bottom of Ravensmoor incline.”

Cecily pressed her forehead against the cold glass.

“You told me the truth in this room three weeks ago,” she said. “You said the marriage was arranged, that you did not see me as you should have, that you were taught to be a duke and not a husband.” She turned. “You did not tell me I left you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you looked at me,” Adrian said, “like a stranger, and asked whether you had been happy, and I could not bear to be the man who answered.”

The silence went on a long time.

“There is more,” Cecily said.

His jaw tightened, and he did not deny it.

“You knew I left because I could not breathe in that house,” she said slowly, feeling her way, feeling the shape of it come up under her hands the way the missing bottom of the box had come up under her thumb. “You have known since the beginning. You did not ask me to stay.”

“No.” The word came out bare.

“You could have. One sentence, in the hall, at midnight, with the carriage at the door. Stay. Nothing else. That is all it would have taken.”

“Yes.”

“And you said nothing at all.”

Adrian Ashford looked up at her, and she saw him exactly as he was for the first time — not a duke, not a stranger, not a man in a story. A tired man in a kitchen chair who had spent two years perfecting his regret, and who was now going to say the thing he had been practising.

“You asked me a question once,” he said. “Whether I wanted you to stay. And the answer was yes. It has always been yes.”

“Then why —”

“Because the last time you stood in front of me,” he said, “you had been crying, and you had packed your own case with your own hands, and I understood, as plainly as I have ever understood anything, that if I said one word to you in that hallway you would have stayed. Out of duty. Out of politeness. Because you were raised properly and you would never have refused your husband to his face.”

He stood up.

“And I had spent two years giving you nothing but duty. So I let you go, and I told myself it was the only unselfish thing I had ever done for you.” A pause. “I have since had occasion to reconsider.”

Cecily found that her hands were shaking.

“Where is the note?” she said. “The one I left on your desk.”

Adrian looked at her for a long moment, and then reached into the breast of his coat, and took out a folded square of paper, worn at the creases from three weeks of handling.

“I have not burned it,” he said. “I have wanted to.”