Page 108 of A Mother for the Blind Duke’s Orphans

“Then I shall say one more thing and risk your temper. Your duchess is not porcelain. If you retreat without explanation, you will not preserve her. You will leave her alone with questions you caused.”

Hector’s chest tightened. “I know.”

Jasper remained where he was for several breaths, then moved toward the door. “You are determined to suffer nobly.”

“I am determined not to injure her.”

“Those may prove to be the same thing if you insist on deciding for both of you.”

The door opened. Hector heard Jasper stop in his tracks.

“For what it is worth,” Jasper said, quieter now, “I do not think a kiss made you dishonorable. I think what you do next will matter more.”

The door closed, and Hector stood alone.

He did not move for a long time. The room settled around him, indistinct and airless. In memory, Poppy lifted her face; he bent toward her with a hunger so tender it had fooled him into calling it harmless.

He regretted it, and he would regret it until the regret became part of him, familiar as the cane in his hand.

And still, when he died, if God allowed a man one mortal sweetness to carry past the dark, Hector knew he would carry the feel of Poppy’s mouth beneath his.

Poppy had expected the house to feel different.

Not visibly. She was not so foolish as to imagine walls would brighten because a man had kissed her, or that ordinary rooms would arrange themselves into proof of a future. Yet some private part of her had believed the air would change between them. That when Hector came near, the distance he had kept with such discipline would no longer be quite so wide. That his voice might lower differently over her name. That he might turn toward her not out of duty, but because he wanted to.

She had not expected happiness to arrive complete. She knew too much for that. But she had expected warmth.

Instead, when she saw him, he bowed, and his face gave nothing away.

“Duchess,” he said.

Not Poppy.

It struck her so softly that no one else would have heard the damage in it. Yet she did. She felt it with an immediacy that shamed her. One kiss, and she had become greedy enough to expect a change in him.

“Your Grace,” she answered.

His fingers shifted at the mention of his title. It was a small movement. If she had not learned to read him in fragments, she would have missed it. Once, such a movement would have pleased her. It would have suggested that he was not as untouched as he appeared.

Now it was not enough.

She looked at him because she could not help it. He seemed to have returned to himself; every open door was shut, and every window barred. The man who had kissed her, whose restraint had broken with a kind of reverent desperation, was nowhere in sight.

Had she imagined him?

No. Her lips remembered, and her whole body remembered the shock of being wanted by him with a need he had not managed to disguise. She had not misunderstood that. Whatever else might be uncertain, that had been real.

Which made this worse.

If the kiss had meant nothing, she could have blamed herself for foolishness and endured the humiliation. But it had meant something. She knew it had. She had felt it in the tremor that passed through him when he touched her, in the way he had stopped afterward as if the world had punished him for being alive.

Perhaps that was what she was seeing now. Not indifference. Punishment.

But her heart, tired of being asked to translate pain into virtue, did not know what to do with the distinction.

“I hope you are well,” he said.

The words were so courteous. They might have been spoken to a neighbor.