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

Chapter 3

Cecily asked the question that had been pressing against her ribs since Hannah first said the word husband.

“Was I happy?”

The Duke froze.

Hannah looked down at the floor. The older servant — Hollis, she would learn later, though no one introduced him — shifted his weight and studied the fire as though it required his full attention.

Adrian Ashford had faced down cabinet ministers, society gossips, and men who wished him ruined, Cecily would later be told. He was said to have a composure carved out of stone. Yet now he stood in a fisherman’s cottage with his hat in his hands and could not answer the simplest question in the world.

“I —” he began. Then stopped.

His silence said everything.

Cecily felt a strange ache in her chest. Not memory. Something like recognition — the way a room feels when you walk into it and know, before you can explain, that you have been unhappy there.

“I see,” she murmured.

Adrian took a slow breath and tried again.

“Our marriage,” he said carefully, “was arranged between our families. The Ashfords and the Marches. It was settled when you were nineteen.”

“That does not answer the question.”

“No.” His honesty startled her. “It does not.”

He moved a step closer, then stopped, as though he had remembered he was dangerous to her.

“You were a gracious duchess,” he said quietly. “Respected. Proper. You oversaw Wrenmoor Hall with flawless dignity. Every account balanced. Every tenant seen to. People praised you to me constantly.”

“And?”

“And I never once told you that I was glad of it.”

The words came out before he seemed able to stop them. His jaw tightened.

“I did not see you,” he said, “the way I should have.”

Hannah’s fingers squeezed Cecily’s hand.

“I was raised to be a duke,” Adrian said. “No one ever taught me how to be a husband.”

The fire cracked. Outside, the wind moved through the bare orchard behind the cottage and made a sound like something breathing.

Cecily looked at him for a long moment — this tall, controlled, proud man carrying a weight of regret far heavier than the journey that had brought him here. She noticed the small things. The mud on his boots from a road he had ridden too hard. The way he had not sat down, though she had not offered. The way he had said was, not is, when he spoke of her happiness.

“Hannah,” she said, without turning. “Would you give us a moment?”

Hannah rose slowly. At the door she paused and looked at the Duke — properly this time, straight on, the way one equal looks at another.

“Winter’s been cruel to her, your grace,” she said. “Go gently.”

The door closed.

Adrian Ashford stood in the middle of the room and, for the first time since he had entered it, seemed entirely unsure of what to do with his hands.

“Ask me something,” he said at last. “Anything. Whatever you need.”

Cecily turned the ring on her finger, once, twice.

“Then tell me this. If I return with you —” she stopped, and started again. “Will I remember who I was?”

“I do not know.”

“And if I never do?”

His voice lowered until she had to lean toward him to hear it.

“Then I will help you become whoever you wish to be.”

She felt Hannah’s absence in the room like a held breath.

“But I will not force you,” Adrian added. “You may remain here as long as you wish.”

That surprised her, and she let him see it.

“You would allow that?”

“Yes.”

“You are a powerful man.”

“I was also a foolish one.”

Their eyes met again, and in the empty halls of her memory something stirred — faint, formless. Not a picture. Not a moment. Only a feeling, old and familiar, like a coat that had once fit her.

Loneliness.

Cecily rose from the chair.

“I cannot return with you yet,” she said.

He nodded once. “I understand.”

“I need time.”

“You shall have it.”

“And if I decide never to come back?”

The Duke of Wrenmoor stood very still. The fire moved light across his face and left it again.

“Then I shall spend the rest of my life,” he said quietly, “wishing I had been a better husband.”

Cecily did not know why, but her heart tightened painfully at that. She turned to the window to hide it.

Outside, the winter wind whispered along the lane and over the frozen millpond, and the Duke of Wrenmoor understood, with the cold clarity of a man reading his own sentence, that he might already have lost his wife forever.