The wet nurse disappeared with the infant, leaving them alone once more in the transformed nursery.
Penelope moved to the window, her back to him, her shoulders rigid.
“You should rest,” he said, the words inadequate but all he could manage. “You look exhausted.”
“As you so gallantly observe,” she said without turning. Her voice held a edge he couldn’t interpret. “Tell me, Your Grace, do you make a habit of critiquing ladies’ appearances, or am I simply fortunate enough to receive your blunt honesty?”
He’d meant it as concern. She’d heard it as criticism.
Of course she had.
“I merely meant—” He stopped, frustrated by his own inability to navigate whatever was happening between them. “You have worked yourself to exhaustion whilst I was away. I thought perhaps you might benefit from?—”
“From your expert opinion on my deficiencies?” She turned now, and the afternoon light caught the gold in her hair, the shadows beneath her eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw. “I am well aware of how I appear, thank you. I am tired.”
“That is not what I—” He broke off, aware that every word was making this worse. That he was failing at something he couldn’tname, proving her right about his fundamental uselessness in every way that mattered.
“What did you mean, then?” she asked, and there was desperation in the question. “What did you truly mean when you said I looked exhausted? That I appear haggard? Unkempt? Unfit to serve as your duchess?”
“I meant,” he said softly, holding her gaze despite the urge to look away, “that you have accomplished in two days what would have taken most women two weeks. I meant that you look like someone who has fought a battle and won it despite overwhelming odds. I meant—” He stopped, the next words catching in his throat.
I meant that you look beautiful. Even exhausted.
But he could not say that. Could not voice the thought that had ambushed him the moment he’d seen her kneeling beside that cradle, dusty and determined and utterly herself.
“I meant no insult,” he finished lamely. “Merely observation.”
She studied him for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then, softly: “You are terrible at this.”
“At what?”
“At being honest.” She moved toward the door, pausing in the threshold to glance back at him. “You hide behind charm anddeflection, but I see through it. I see you trying to say something genuine and then retreating behind walls the moment it becomes uncomfortable. And I wonder—” She stopped, shaking her head. “Never mind. It does not matter.”
“What?” he asked, taking a step toward her despite every instinct screaming at him to let her go. “What do you wonder?”
She met his eyes, and in that moment, the careful masks they both wore seemed to slip just enough for truth.
“I wonder if you are capable of letting anyone see you,” she said quietly. “Truly see you, without the armour and the performance and the careful distance you maintain. Or if you are so committed to being what everyone expects that you have forgotten how to be anything else.”
The words struck with devastating accuracy, cutting through defences he hadn’t realized he was maintaining.
Before he could respond—before he could formulate any answer that would not be a lie or an evasion—she was gone, her footsteps fading down the corridor, leaving him alone in the golden light of a nursery she’d transformed.
Leaving him with questions he had no idea how to answer.
And the terrible, unsettling realization that somewhere between his departure and return, something fundamental had shifted.
He’d left a wife he barely knew.
He’d returned to find a woman he could not stop thinking about.
CHAPTER 10
“You cannot possibly mean to tell me that is enough.”
Penelope glanced up from where she knelt beside Rose’s cradle, adjusting the blanket for what must have been the fifth time in as many minutes. Alastair stood in the nursery doorway, one shoulder propped against the frame with that infuriating ease he seemed to possess even when delivering criticism.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked, though she had heard him perfectly well.