Page 50 of How Not to Marry a Duke

The paper was thick beneath his fingers, cream-coloured and expensive, the sort of stationery a duke was expected to use for correspondence that would never be sent. He had purchased an entire ream of it three weeks ago. At this rate, he would need to purchase another.

He did not let himself reread what he had written. He never did. The words came out of him like blood from a wound—necessary, perhaps, but nothing he wished to examine too closely. He folded the paper with practised precision, three creases that aligned perfectly, and locked it in the drawer with the others.

Twenty-nine, he thought.

Twenty-nine letters to a woman who would never read them, written by a man who had no right to write them, about feelings he had no business feeling.

He was beginning to suspect he might be going mad.

The fire had burned low. The whisky in his glass had gone warm. Outside, London settled into the quiet of deep night—the occasional rattle of a late carriage, the distant bark of a dog, the soft footsteps of servants moving through darkened hallways.

Frederick sat in his chair and did not sleep.

Seventy-four hours since her garden.

Seventy-five.

Seventy-six.

He counted them the way other men counted sheep—not to find sleep, but to fill the silence where sleep should have been. The hours accumulated like debts, each one a reminder of what he had almost done, what he had not quite done, what he desperately wanted to do.

Somewhere in Surrey, a man who cared about hedgerows was probably sleeping peacefully.

Frederick hoped, with a viciousness that surprised him, that Lord Camberton’s hedgerows developed blight.

Seventy-seven.

Seventy-eight.

He counted until dawn.

Chapter Fifteen

The Suitor

Seven, Florinda thought, watching the morning light shift across her bedroom ceiling. Seven weeks since the fall.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood—carefully, testing the strength of the limb that had betrayed her. The carpet was cool beneath her bare feet. Her leg held. It ached, as it always ached now when the weather turned damp, but it held.

Progress. That was what Margot called it.

She could manage the stairs without assistance now. Could cross a room without clutching at furniture. Could receive callers in the drawing room like a proper lady rather than holding court from a wheeled chair in the garden like some ancient invalid empress. She could pretend, at least, to be the woman she had been before.

Before strong arms and fourteen stairs and a letter she should never have read.

She crossed to the window. The gardens below were brown and bare—November had stripped the roses to their bones, left the hedgerows skeletal and stark. From here, if she craned her neck at just the right angle, she could see the edge of Carthedge land.

She did not crane her neck. She was trying to be sensible.

* * *

"The hornbeam," Lord Camberton was saying, "is tragically underappreciated."

Four. He had visited four times this week. Florinda had begun counting without meaning to—the visits, the cups of tea, the minutes spent discussing hedge varieties. Her mind seemed incapable of not counting things now, as though she had caught the habit like an illness.

Margot's drawing room held the warmth of a well-tended fire and the faint sweetness of the hothouse flowers she kept on the mantel even in winter. Lord Camberton sat in the chair nearest the hearth—the good chair, the one with the embroidered cushion—and Florinda could not help noticing how naturally he fit there. How comfortable he looked, with his teacup balanced on his knee and his soft hands gesturing enthusiastically about shrubbery.

He did not look like a man in turmoil. He did not look like a man who had spent sleepless nights writing letters he would never send.