“I do not need you to make my life manageable, Eliza.” His voice dropped, and he took another step and another until he stood before her with barely a foot of space between them. Close enough to see the rapid pulse at her throat. Close enough to catch the faint scent of lavender that clung to her skin. “I want you because you make it meaningful. You are not a convenience. You are the point.”
Her breath caught. He heard it—a small, sharp intake that she could not quite suppress. Her gray eyes searched his face, and he let her look. Let her see everything he had spent a lifetime hiding. The exhaustion. The loneliness. The desperate, terrifying need for someone who saw him clearly and chose to stay.
“I am not here to persuade you or to manage this situation,” he said. “I am here to ask, not to tell. The decision is entirely yours.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing he had ever heard.
Eliza looked at him. Her expression was unreadable—not cold, not warm, not anything he could interpret or respond to. The face of a woman who had learned, through years of hardship and loss, to guard herself against words that promised more than they delivered.
He stood before her and waited. Did not fill the silence with charm or humor or any of the thousand tools he had always used to smooth over difficult moments. He simply stood there, stripped bare, and let her decide what to do with what she saw.
When she finally spoke, her voice was calm.
“I need time.”
Three words. They landed in his chest like a fist.
“You have had months to reach this understanding, August.” She held his gaze without flinching. “I deserve the same courtesy.”
“Of course.” The words came out even. He was proud of that. Proud that his voice did not crack or waver, even as something inside him splintered. “Of course, you do.”
“I would like you to leave now.”
He nodded. His body felt heavy, as though gravity had doubled in the space of a heartbeat. He took a step back. Then another. The distance between them widened, and each inch felt like a wound.
He turned toward the door.
“August.”
He stopped. Did not turn. Could not turn because if he looked at her again, he might say something foolish, might beg or plead or try to convince her, and he had promised himself andherthat the decision was hers.
“I will send word when I am ready to talk again.”
He closed his eyes. He could only wait and trust and sit with the same gnawing uncertainty he had forced upon her for months.
Thirty-Seven
“Good heavens! If I wanted to live in a flower market, I should have married a Dutchman!”
Lady Hartwell nearly lost her balance on a mound of white hyacinths outside her own drawing room and let out a sound that from anyone else would have been a shriek.
She prodded the offending bouquet with her cane, dislodging several petals. “Another delivery, my dear?” she called, already knowing the answer. The question was strictly for Eliza’s benefit.
Eliza did not look up. She was ensconced on the settee by the window, surrounded on all sides by boxes, bundles, and posies in every permutation. She read with her knees drawn up under her skirts, the edge of August’s latest missive trembling slightly in her hands.
“Do you suppose he means to buy up every flower in London or simply run the florists out of stock?” Lady Hartwell demanded,nudging a cluster of roses off the side table to create space for her tea. “I am perfectly prepared to have you back, child, but this is ridiculous. Even your mother’s love affair with sweet peas never reached such… agricultural excess.”
“He’s just trying to be thorough,” Eliza muttered, eyes flicking across the page again, as if the words might alter under inspection.
“Thorough! It is an outright siege. My footmen have blisters.” The cane thunked decisively against a crate of lilies, sending a whiff of perfume through the air. “And these,” she continued, plucking a card from among the stems, “are addressed to the cat. Do you think he is desperate or simply lost his mind?”
Eliza smiled despite herself and set the letter aside with uncharacteristic care. “I suspect the latter.”
Lady Hartwell eyed her, sharp as a hawk. “I presume he is not sending empty pages? Or does your His Grace now express himself exclusively in florals?”
Eliza shook her head but did not answer. She reached for the next envelope, fingers brushing the embossed seal as if it might burn. “They are… letters.” She could not bring herself to call them what they were—apologies, confessions, a slow unspooling of everything he had once refused to say aloud.
“Read it to me, then,” Lady Hartwell said, collapsing into her favorite armchair with a groan. “At least let me share in the melodrama I am forced to house.”