“The rake was easier. The rake wassafe. If you expect nothing, nothing can disappoint you. If you never care, no one can leave you standing in an empty house wondering what you did wrong.” His jaw tightened. “I was very good at it. Brilliant, in fact. London’s finest cautionary tale—charming, careless, impeccably dressed, and entirely hollow. Every hostess wanted me at her table and every mother warned her daughter. I was precisely what I was supposed to be.”
“And now?”
The question left her mouth before she could shape it into something less worrisome. It hung between them, naked and impossible to retract.
Alastair looked at her.
The fire had burned low, the light softer now, catching the planes of his face in ways that made the sharp angles look almost gentle. His eyes searched her face with quiet, undefended regard of a man looking at someone who had become, without permission or warning, the fixed point around which everything else revolved.
“Now,” he said slowly, “I sit in a drawing room in the countryside, planning how to reunite a baby with her parents and shield a commoner from an earl. I argue about pear mush. I know which lullaby settles Rose fastest and which blanket she prefers when her gums ache. I worry about a woman who manages my household better than I ever could and who, for reasons I cannot fathom, still has not packed her things and fled from this catastrophe of a marriage.”
His voice had roughened. He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help.
“I was supposed to be the man who wanted nothing. And instead I find myself wanting?—”
He stopped.
The word hung unfinished in the air between them.Wanting.The fire hissed. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece, measuring out seconds that felt enormous.
“Wanting what?” Penelope whispered.
Alastair held her gaze for a long, unbroken moment. His jaw worked. His hand flexed against the arm of the chair, the tendons taut beneath the skin. A muscle pulled at the corner of his mouth—not a smile, not quite. The ghost of one. The scar of one.
Then he smiled almost sadly. The smile of a man standing at the edge of a cliff and choosing, just this once, not to jump.
“Everything I swore I’d never need,” he said. “Which is rather inconvenient, all things considered.”
He stood before she could press further. Collected his glass—still untouched—and paused beside her chair. She felt the warmth of him, the nearness, the deliberate restraint of a man keeping himself on a leash.
“Goodnight, Penelope.”
“Goodnight.”
He left. She listened to his footsteps recede down the corridor. Counted them. Twelve steps to the staircase. Then silence.
The fire had collapsed to embers. The room felt colder without him in it, which was absurd, because he had been sitting six feet away and generating no heat whatsoever.
Everything I swore I’d never need.
She pressed her fingers against her mouth and stared at the dying fire and did not move for a very long time.
Because she knew—with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who had spent weeks building walls and watching them fall—that he had not been speaking about Rose.
CHAPTER 24
“We go to her.”
The words left Penelope’s mouth in the grey half-light before breakfast, while the house was still waking around them and the last of the night clung to the windows like condensation. She had not slept. Had not tried, if she were honest. She had lain in the dark for hours with the shape of a plan assembling itself behind her ribs, precise and frightening and absolutely necessary, the way a surgeon’s knife is necessary—unwanted but the only instrument equal to the wound.
Alastair looked up from the letter he was writing. His study smelled of cold ink and the bergamot tea Mrs. Keating insisted on bringing at first light regardless of whether anyone had asked for it. He had not slept either. She could see it in the bruised hollows beneath his eyes, in the careful way he held his pen, as though the act of writing were the only thing tethering him to ordinary reality.
“Go to whom?” he asked, though the wary stillness of his hand told her he already knew.
“Marianne.” Penelope moved into the room. Not to the chair opposite his desk—too far, too formal, too much like a wife being received by a husband. She went to the window seat instead, where the early light fell in long pale bars across the cushion, and sat with her back against the casement so she could face him squarely. “We go to her ourselves. To the Whitcombe estate. Before her father can move against us.”
Alastair set down the pen. He did it slowly, with the precise deliberation of a man who was choosing his next words the way one chose footing on ice.
“You want to ride into the Whitcombe estate—the private residence of a lord who has just promised to destroy us in open court—and remove his daughter.”