Page 29 of How Not to Marry a Duke

"I know," she told it. "I am being ridiculous."

The potato-horse did not disagree.

Chapter Nine

The Unsent Letter

The clock struck two.

Frederick had been staring at the blank page for forty-seven minutes. He knew this, having counted. He had also counted the logs in the fireplace (four), the books on the shelf nearest his desk (thirty-one), and the number of times he had told himself to go to bed like a reasonable person (twelve).

He had not gone to bed. He had not slept properly in weeks.

The problem, he had determined, was that his brain refused to cease its infernal cataloguing. Tonight's inventory included: fourteen gold threads in her hair (still), seven instances of her laughter (echoing), forty-two seconds of direct eye contact (insufficient), and one extremely inappropriate thought about the curve of her neck that he was not going to examine further.

He was losing his mind.

This was, he reflected, what came of carrying women up and down staircases twice daily. One's thoughts became disordered. One's priorities became confused. One found oneself sitting alone in one's study at two o'clock in the morning, contemplating paper and ink like some sort of lovesick poet.

He was not a poet. He was a duke. Dukes did not write letters to women who were not their fiancées. Dukes did not lose sleep over the precise cadence of a laugh or the way a particular woman said "fourteen stairs" as though it were a private joke between them.

Dukes, apparently, were capable of spectacular self-delusion.

He picked up the pen.

He put it down.

He picked it up again.

"This is ridiculous," he informed the empty room. The empty room declined to comment.

He wrote: Dear Lady Florinda

No. Too formal. He crossed it out.

Florinda

Too intimate. He crossed that out too.

To the woman who has thoroughly ruined my capacity for rational thought

Accurate, but unlikely to be well-received. He crossed it out with rather more force than necessary.

The page was becoming a battlefield of ink. He crumpled it, tossed it toward the fire (missed), and started fresh.

He was writing love letters to a woman sleeping three doors away while engaged to another. This was either poetry or madness.

Possibly both.

He tried again:

I have made a list of forty-three reasons why this wanting must cease.

That, at least, was honest. He continued:

None of them are sufficient.

I have tried duty. I have tried honor. I have tried reminding myself, repeatedly, that I am engaged to a perfectly pleasant woman who has done nothing to deserve a husband whose thoughts are perpetually elsewhere.