Page 95 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Here. Not going somewhere else.”

“I am not going anywhere, Freddie.”

He searched her face a moment longer, measuring her against whatever metric he had devised for the reliability of adult promises, before his eyes closed and his fingers loosened around the hem of her robe. He had decided to trust her, and his decision was final.

Charlie had not spoken. He lay on his side, blanket drawn to his chin, his green eyes open and still. When Alice smoothed his hair back from his forehead, his hand came up and found her wrist with the light, deliberate pressure of a boy confirming that the hand was real and the person behind it was not going to vanish between one breath and the next.

She held still. His eyes moved across her face and found whatever they were searching for, because his fingers loosened and his breath came out long and slow and the vigilance behind his gaze receded into something willing to let sleep approach.

Kenneth stood at the foot of the bed. She could feel his gaze on the back of her neck. She stayed with Charlie’s hand on her wrist until his breathing deepened, and then withdrew and pressed her palm against the ache in her lower back, which had begun its accounting of the evening and intended to be thorough.

The housekeeper met them in the corridor and informed them that all the servants at Bearmoor House were accounted for, none injured. Miss Leyton was shaken but unharmed. She had sent word that they all should rest.

Kenneth thanked her, his voice still rough from the smoke, and asked her to have a bath drawn for Alice. The housekeeper nodded and withdrew, and they were left alone in the dim passage, smelling of smoke and exhaustion and the silence that filled a space after something had been torn open and not yet mended.

“Goodnight,” Alice said.

He looked at her. His mouth opened and closed without sound, and the silence carried more than words would have.

She turned and walked to her room, and his footsteps neither followed nor retreated. She closed the door, put her back against it, and breathed.

The maid had drawn the bath. Steam curled above the copper tub, carrying lavender and something green and herbal, and the room was warm.

Alice stood at the door and felt the full weight of the night arrive: the ache in her knees and her back and the rawness of her throat and the leaden heaviness of her arms, which had held two children against a burning corridor and had not considered letting go.

She unfastened the borrowed robe. The nightgown beneath was stiff with soot and clung to her skin in places that required peeling rather than removing. The peeling was its own kind of undressing, each layer lifted away, and beneath it her skin was flushed and tender. Her fingers, steady through smoke and a blade’s reflection and a corridor she would see behind her eyelids for years, were not steady now.

The knock came as her nightgown hit the floor.

She seized the robe and pulled it closed. “Yes?”

The door opened two inches. Kenneth’s face appeared in the gap, his gaze moving from her face to the steam rising behind her to the robe held shut at her throat, and something behind his eyes shifted, the composure cracking where the effort of holding it became visible.

“I can come back in the morning,” he offered.

The sentence carried the shape of every distance he had ever placed between them. But she was tired, tired in her bones and her blood and the place behind her eyes where the will to pretend lived, and she was done pretending.

“Come in,” she said.

He hesitated.

“Sit.” She indicated the chair beside the washstand.

He sat. His elbows went to his knees, and his hands hung between them.

“I told you I would not stand in the corridor again.” He was looking at his hands. “I stood in one tonight. A burning one.”

His thumb pressed against the opposite knuckle, whitening the joint.

“When I found you…” He began, his voice hoarse. “Your back to the fire, the boys beneath you—” He stopped.

His jaw tensed, the motion visible at the hinge. When he continued, the roughness in his voice had thickened into something that was not smoke.

“I have been telling myself I was protecting you.” His eyes lifted to hers. “But I was protecting myself. From wanting this so badly that the wanting could destroy me the way it destroyed…” He stopped again. His hands pressed together between his knees, trembling. “I governed it. I governed everything, and it has made me into my father. My father died in a room he never left, and I will not…” The sentence lost its footing. He breathed once, roughly, the sound of composure being abandoned rather than lost. “I want mornings, Alice. Arguments. The boys in the garden. A child.”

The word split open in his mouth, and what ran beneath it was the thing she had been reading in his body for months, the thing his voice had never been adequate to carry. His eyes, when they held hers, were bright in a way she had never seen before, bright with the raw and total fear of a man who had said everything he possessed and was sitting in a chair in a room full of steam, waiting to learn whether everything was enough.

“I know what it cost you when I closed that door.” His voice barely held. “Let me begin again.”