Waverly was there. Brightmore too. And Lord Cavanagh, who had married young and lost his wife to fever two years ago and now drank with the steady, professional dedication of a man anaesthetising himself against memory.
Alastair sat. Accepted cards. Played a hand. Then another. Won one, lost one, won again—the results indistinguishable from each other, all of them meaningless, all of them filling the minutes that stretched interminably between this moment and whatever came next.
“Must say,” Waverly announced, shuffling with the sloppy grandeur of a man well into his cups, “never thought I’d see the day our resident reprobate went domestic. How long did it last? A month? Two?”
Brightmore snorted into his whisky. “Generous. I gave it three weeks before he’d be back at the tables boring us with his winning streak.”
“I believe,” Waverly continued, warming to his subject, “the precise wager was—what did you say, Brightmore? That the great Duke of Blackmere would tire of playing house before the summer turned?”
Brightmore raised his glass in mock salute. “And here he sits, gentlemen. Right on schedule. Marriage thoroughly survived. Temporary insanity concluded. Normal service restored.”
Laughter rippled around the table. Cavanagh did not laugh. He watched Alastair over the rim of his glass with the flat, knowing gaze of a man who recognised the landscape of loss because he had walked it himself.
Alastair’s hand stilled on the cards.
Temporary insanity.
Normal service restored.
The words should have amused him. Should have slid off like everything else—another quip, another joke at his expense, another chapter in the ongoing comedy of the Rake Who Couldn’t Be Tamed. He had survived a decade of such remarks. Had cultivated them, for God’s sake. Had built his entire identity around being the man who could not be touched, could notbe changed, could not be brought to heel by something as pedestrian as love.
But the wordtemporarylodged in his skull and would not shift.
Because that was what he’d told her, wasn’t it? Or close enough.It was never meant to be anything else.He had said those words—to Crawford, in his study, in a voice designed to sound controlled and reasonable—whilst the woman who had rebuilt his entire life from the foundations was somewhere in the house, packing her trunk.
Temporary.The midnight hours hovering outside the nursery door, listening for the catch in Rose’s breathing. The morning Penelope had stood in his study and told him, with a calm that was more terrifying than anger, that she would go to the Whitcombe estate herself—that she would risk everything to protect a friend who had trusted her. The afternoon on the hilltop, when she had laughed with her hair unpinned and her composure abandoned and her whole face open in a way he had never seen before and never since—the single most miserable moment of his entire wretched life.
He set the cards down.
“Reed?” Waverly frowned. “Your play.”
“I fold.”
“You fold? You’ve got a winning?—”
“I fold.” He stood. The chair scraped. Brightmore exchanged a glance with Waverly—the silent, bewildered communication of men who sensed something had shifted in the room but lacked the vocabulary to name it.
Cavanagh said nothing. Merely inclined his head—the smallest gesture, barely perceptible—and the recognition in it nearly broke Alastair open where he stood.
Go,that nod said.Before it’s too late. Before you become me.
The night was cold. His boots struck the pavement with a rhythm that accelerated without his permission, carrying him down St. James’s and across Piccadilly, weaving between carriages and pedestrians and the general, teeming chaos of a London evening that no longer had anything to do with him.
He was not going home.
He was goinghome.
The distinction cracked through him like a fracture line through ice—sudden, clean, irreversible. Home was not a townhouse on Grosvenor Square. Was not an estate in the countryside with its rolling hills and immaculate gardens. Home was a woman who argued with him about linen, who rolled her eyes at his compliments, who had once held a sick baby for nine straight hours without complaint and then wept into her pillow when she thought no one could hear.
Home was Penelope, and he had let her walk out of it because he was a coward and a fool and so spectacularly, comprehensively afraid of wanting something that could be taken from him that he had handed it over himself.
His carriage was not waiting. He hadn’t brought one. He hailed a hackney from the corner of Albemarle Street—the Duke of Blackmere, standing on a street corner in the dark, flagging down a hired cab like a common clerk too late for an appointment. The driver stared. Alastair didn’t care.
“Curzon Street,” he said. “Blackmere House. And if you can get me there in under ten minutes, I’ll pay you enough to retire to the coast.”
The driver whipped the horses forward without further discussion.
Alastair sat back against the cracked leather seat and pressed his knuckles to his mouth. His pulse hammered—not in his wrists or his temples but everywhere, his entire body conducting a single, insistent rhythm that saidhurry, hurry, hurry, you have wasted so much time already.