“Tell you what?”
“Whatever it is that made you leave that room.”
Mary stepped back from the doorway, and Evander entered. He did not sit. He stood near the window with his hands at his sides, giving her the space the room allowed, and waited.
Mary pressed her fingers against her collarbone, where Tommy’s fist usually gripped, and the absence of his weight made the words come.
“I cannot lose him.” Her voice was low and unsteady. “I know the plan. Richard is here, and Charlotte will return, and Tommy will go to his parents, and this house will go back to what it was before we wed. I know that. I agreed to it. But… I have rocked that baby to sleep every night for weeks, Evander. I have learned his sounds. I know which cry means hunger, which means tiredness, and which means he just wants to be held. I know that he prefers my left arm to my right, and that he sleeps better when someone hums. I havememorizedhim. And now you are asking me to hand him to a mother who has not been here, and a father who may not exist, and I cannot.” Her voice cracked. “I cannot do that.”
Evander watched her. The composure softened, layer by layer, the way morning light softened a room, and what emerged beneath it was not the duke, or the guardian, or the man who managed crises with controlled precision.
It was a man who had told her he’d always come back.
“And it is not only Tommy.” Mary pressed on before courage could fail her. “It is this. Us. Whatever this has become.” She met his eyes. “I do not want to lose that, either.”
The room went quiet. Sunlight fell across the floor between them, and the sounds of the house drifted in from below, muffled and distant.
Evander crossed to her. He stopped close enough that she could see the exhaustion in his eyes, the tension in his jaw, and the effort it was costing him to stand still.
“I can give you a child.”
Mary stared at him.
“If what you want is a baby of your own, I can give you that.” His voice was steady, but his hands were not. He clasped them behind his back, the way he did when he was holding himself together. “A son or a daughter. Yours. And I would help raise the child, the same way I have helped with Tommy. I would provide for you both. I would be present. I would not disappear.”
Mary’s lips parted. The offer hung between them, enormous and devastating, and she waited for the rest of it. The part that would make it whole.
“But I cannot be the husband you want me to be.” Evander’s gaze held hers, and the steadiness in it was the steadiness of a man walking a ledge. “I do not disregard what has happened between us, Mary. The time we have spent. I am not dismissing any of it. But I have watched what passion does when it takes hold. It consumed my father. It destroyed this family. And I will not risk becoming what he became. Not to you. Not to a child.”
Mary felt each word arrive separately, like stones dropped into water, and the surface she had been standing on rippled and sank beneath her feet.
“You are offering me a child,” she said, “without offering me a real marriage.”
“I am offering you what I am capable of giving.”
“And love is not included.”
Evander’s jaw worked. His hands stayed clasped behind his back. “I am asking you to think about it. That is all. Consider what I am offering.”
“You’re offering everything except you.”
He held her gaze for three more seconds. Then he turned and walked to the door.
“Think about it,” he said.
The door closed behind him. His footsteps faded down the corridor, steady and measured, the way they always were, as though the man producing them had not just offered his wife a child and withheld himself in the same breath.
Mary stood in the center of her bedroom and opened her mouth to call after him. To shout. To say every furious, wounded thing that pressed against her teeth.
How dare he?
How dare he stand in her room and offer her a baby the way another man might offer a new gown, as though motherhood were a consolation prize for a marriage he refused to inhabit. How dare he kiss her and then deliver a proposal stripped of the one thing that made any of it bearable.
But the shout did not come. The fury rose and crested and broke, and what lay beneath it was not anger.
It was a loss. The sound of his footsteps growing fainter. The click of his study door closing two floors below. The distance between them was expanding, not because he was walking away, but because he had just shown her, with absolute clarity, how close he was willing to come?—
And where he intended to stop.