Page 89 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“No.”

The man withdrew.

Kenneth turned the glass by its rim and watched the firelight move through the amber. The color was the color of the silk she had worn at the Worthington ball.

The thought settled behind his ribs where he could not return it to wherever it had come from.

He had told her the truth. She had told him hers. And then the latch had closed, and the dark had come, and he had sat in it.

The thing that kept him at his club on a Wednesday evening was not guilt precisely, though guilt was present, a steady undertow. It was the image of her face at the moment she said want.

He had put that on her face. The composure and the crack in it.

“You look as dreadful as I had hoped.”

Jonathan preceded himself into the room as always, warmth and insult arriving in equal measure before the rest of him caught up.

Kenneth did not turn. He heard the creak of the chair beside his, the click of a glass being set down, someone settling in uninvited and entirely at ease about it.

“I was not expecting you,” he said.

“No one ever expects me. It is the foundation of my social strategy.” Jonathan stretched his legs toward the fire. “Your butler told me you had gone out. I applied my considerable intellect and deduced that you are either at your mistress’s or at your club, and since you are constitutionally incapable of the former, here I am.”

“I have not fled.”

“You are sitting in the dark with a brandy and a newspaper you haven’t read, looking for all the world like someone who has been invited to his own execution and arrived early to ensure the arrangements are in order.” Jonathan sipped his drink. “That is fleeing, Kenneth. You have simply done it in a chair.”

Kenneth set the glass down. The clink of crystal on wood was louder than he had intended. “I came out for a drink.”

“You have a decanter in your study that I personally replenished at Christmas. Try again.”

The fire shifted. A log settled, sending sparks up the flue, and the light changed, throwing Jonathan’s face into sharp relief: the easy posture, the angled smile, the eyes that were not smiling at all.

“Kenneth.” Jonathan’s voice dropped. What remained was the voice from the study doorway at Bearmoor House, plain and unadorned. “When did you last speak to her? Not this performance you are staging. When did you last say something true?”

“I have said nothing that was not true.”

“You have said nothing at all. That is the trick, is it not? Silence passes for discretion, and discretion passes for care. Meanwhile, she sits in the morning room every evening, reading a book she is not reading, and you sit on the other side of the wall, and neither of you moves, and you call that marriage.”

Kenneth’s jaw tightened. “You’re overstepping.”

“I have been overstepping for eight years. Since the morning I found you in the nursery holding the twins and wearing the expression of someone who had decided nothing would touch him again.” Jonathan’s voice was quiet, and the quiet carried more than volume ever had. “The decision served you then. It is destroying you now.”

“You do not know what happened between us.”

“I know what you look like when you have done something you believe was necessary and cannot bear the cost of it.” Jonathan turned his glass, watching the firelight move through it. “You looked like that the morning I left Bearmoor. You look like that now.”

“Leave it, Jonathan.”

“Your father said that.” The words landed without haste and without softness. “Whenever anyone came close to the thing he could not say, he said leave it, and everyone left it, and the silence ate the house from the inside.” Jonathan held his gaze steadily. “Someone must say this. Alice has been too generous, and the boys are too young, so that leaves me.”

The fire crackled in the grate, and behind them, a footman passed, his footsteps muffled on the carpet.

“You told me once, in the tavern at Bearmoor, that you married her because she was there. Because the licence was acquired. Because the twins needed stability.” Jonathan set down his glass. “And I told you that you were lying. The difference is that back then, you had nothing to lose by the lie except time.”

Kenneth’s throat worked once. He felt it in his jaw, in the tendons of his neck. “I am protecting her.”

“You are protecting yourself.” The words were careful, and the care made them worse. “The same way he did. Deciding what everyone in his household was permitted to feel and calling it duty, because the word fear would not fit in his mouth.”