The image formed unbidden—August sitting in this very drawing room, his head bent over a notebook, carefully recording details about a woman he barely knew. A woman who was about to become his wife.
“That does not mean?—”
“It means he cares. Whether he has admitted it to himself or not, he cares what you think of him. He cares about your comfort and your happiness. Men do not take notes about women they view as mere conveniences.”
Eliza wanted to believe it. Wanted to take Lady Hartwell’s words and hold them close, let them warm the cold place that had opened in her chest when she overheard August describing their marriage as practical and timely.
But wanting something did not make it true.
“I do not know what to do,” she said.
“Yes, you do. You simply do not wish to do it because it requires vulnerability. It requires trusting that your husband might surprise you.” Lady Hartwell released her hand and moved back to her chair. “Stay here as long as you need. But Eliza—do notstay forever. Do not let fear rob you of something that might be real.”
Eliza returned to her own chair and picked up her teacup. The tea had gone cold. She drank it anyway, needing something to do with her hands.
She wondered what August was doing at this hour. Perhaps he was in his study. Working through ledgers and correspondence, managing the thousand demands that came with being a duke. Attending to his responsibilities with that methodical efficiency that had always defined him.
Did he think of her at all? Did he notice the empty chair across from him at breakfast or the vacant seat in the library? Or was her absence simply another adjustment he was managing with his usual competence—unfortunate but ultimately manageable, like a minor change in household staff?
She set down her teacup and stared at the cold tea remaining in the bottom.
She did not know. And that not knowing felt like standing at the edge of a precipice, unable to see the bottom, uncertain whether stepping forward would mean falling or flying.
Thirty-Five
August groaned.
The sound escaped him before he could stop it, low and rough and entirely unbecoming of a duke. He pressed his knuckles against his forehead and stared at the same paragraph he had been reading for the better part of twenty minutes. The figures had not changed. The ink had not rearranged itself into something comprehensible. And yet he could not, for the life of him, have told anyone what the paragraph said.
Three days. Three days since Eliza had left, and his mind had become utterly, maddeningly useless.
He pulled the ledger closer, as though proximity might force comprehension.
The study looked like a man losing a war with himself. Papers fanned across the desk in overlapping layers, correspondence half answered, steward’s reports marked with notations thattrailed off mid-sentence, a letter to his solicitor that began with confident authority and devolved into illegible scratching. His cup of tea sat at the corner of the desk where Denton had placed it hours ago. The surface had gone cold and still, a faint skin forming on top.
And the clock.
That damned grandfather clock in the corner had always ticked. He knew this. It had ticked when his father used this study, had ticked through every meeting and every crisis and every quiet afternoon August had spent here since inheriting the title. But it had never sounded like this. Never so loud, so insistent, each tick landing in the silence like a stone dropped into a well.
Because the silence was never this absolute.
He rubbed his temples with both hands, pressing hard enough to see sparks behind his closed lids. The quill clattered to the desk when he released it. He left it there.
The manor was quiet. Not peaceful—he had learned, in three days, that there was a vast and terrible difference between the two. Peaceful was Eliza reading in the library while he worked. Peaceful was the sound of her footsteps in the hallway, the knowledge that she was somewhere nearby, existing in the same space. This was not peaceful. This was the absence of her, and it filled every room he entered like smoke.
Focus. You are a duke. Read the damned paragraph.
He tried. Got through the first line—quarterly rents from the eastern tenancies—and then her voice slipped in, unbidden and unwelcome and achingly clear.
“You cannot possibly eat that much marmalade and still call yourself civilized, August.”
Breakfast. A morning three weeks ago, perhaps four. She had been sitting across from him with her tea, one eyebrow raised in that way she had—not quite mocking, not quite amused, something sharper and more dangerous than either. He had responded with something clever, something designed to make her smile, and she had obliged him with a laugh she tried to hide behind her cup.
He could hear that laugh now. Could see the way her eyes had gone bright with it, the way her composure cracked just enough to reveal the woman beneath.
The woman who sat with your father in his final days. Who read to him when you could not bear to enter the room. Who held your mother’s hand at the funeral and never once asked for thanks.
August shoved back from the desk. The chair scraped against the floor with a sound that made him wince.