Page 88 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

She was very still.

“I will not have more children, Alice.”

Alice’s face did not crumple. He had braced for it. Instead, she held very still, and something rapid and private moved behind her eyes. When it settled, the expression that remained was steady.

The steadiness was worse than tears, because she was rebuilding herself around what he had said using his own materials and his own method, and seeing his construction turned against him was a reckoning he had not anticipated.

“I understand,” she said.

“Alice.”

“I am not angry.” Her voice was level and very careful. “I would not ask for what you cannot give. But you should know that when Charlie asked that question at supper, the first thing I felt was not surprise.” She paused, and her composure thinned. “The first thing I felt was want. And the want was not abstract, Kenneth. It was a child with your eyes and my hair in a house where the banisters are already worn from small hands. I did not know I had built that picture until you told me it does not exist.”

She reached for the door handle behind her.

“You have been honest with me tonight. I owe you the same.” Her voice was quiet, steady in a way that was worse than breaking, because steadiness at this cost was something she had learned from him, and they both knew it. “I need to be somewhere else before it shows.”

The latch caught behind her.

Kenneth sat in the chair with his book face-down on the table and the candle burning toward its end and did not follow her, because following required offering something he had just finished explaining he could not give.

He sat until the candle went out. What remained of the night passed without sleep, and when the grey light filtered through the curtains, he rose and dressed and descended to the carriage and carried nothing with him except the weight of what he had done.

They returned to London that morning.

Alice sat with her face turned toward the window and spoke when spoken to with a warmth that touched nothing beneath it. Kenneth sat opposite and managed the silence by attending to its components, and the strategy did not serve him.

Freddie filled the quiet with noise: the dragon, Dorset, whether they might get a dog. Kenneth understood his son knew what he was doing, because noise was the only weapon Freddie possessed.

Charlie sat beside Alice with his hands in his lap. Midway through the journey, he reached over and placed his hand on her arm without speaking. Alice looked down at the small fingers, then at the boy, and her throat bobbed. She covered his hand with hers and held on.

Kenneth watched from across the carriage. The borders held.

For the first time, he was not certain that he wanted them to.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The brandy had gone tepid in his glass.

The club was quiet. It was a Wednesday, late enough that what remained of the members had settled into the heavy, companionable silence he had once found restorative and now found too loud.

Two lords murmured in the far corner.

A footman replenished glasses without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Kenneth registered none of it, which was its own kind of answer: he had come here for the absence of her, and the absence had followed him, and the brandy tasted of nothing because nothing was what he had chosen.

He had come to be somewhere that was not the house on Grosvenor Square, and that was the sum of it. He had left his study at half past eight because the study shared a wall with the morning room, and the morning room was where Alice sat in the evenings now, since the distance between them had calcified from something accidental into something structural, and he could hear her through the plaster.

The small involuntary sounds of her presence: the shift of weight in a chair, the turn of a page, the quiet exhalation she made when she reached a passage that moved her. Sounds his body had no right to hear and heard regardless, tuned to her since the night she closed his door with a latch-click that still sat in his chest like a coin dropped into a well, falling without arriving at the bottom.

Seven days.

Seven days of the courteous, unbearable arrangement they had constructed. Separate meals at different hours, explained to the staff as the demands of his schedule and to the boys as obligations in town. She had accepted it with the same composed efficiency she had employed in his room at Bearmoor House, the careful steadiness he had taught her by example and that she now turned against him so precisely he found it devastating.

She was everywhere. In the twins’ laughter, which had acquired a looseness since her arrival that he could not replicate and whose absence, when he was alone with the boys, had become its own sound. In the morning room at half past nine, her feet tucked beneath her on the settee, the robe over her nightgown slipping off one shoulder in a way she never noticed and he could not stop noticing. In the corridor at half past seven, her quiet “good morning” carrying the exact warmth of courtesy and nothing more, and the nothing more landing in his chest like a fist.

The footman appeared at his elbow. “Another brandy, Your Grace?”