“My horse, Marsden. The fastest one in the stable. Five minutes.”
“Shall I prepare a bag? A change of clothes?”
“There is no time.”
“Your Grace, Dover is a considerable distance, and you are not dressed for?—”
“Marsden.” Hugo tucked the note into his coat pocket. “Five minutes.”
Marsden bowed and moved toward the stables with a speed that suggested he understood, without being told, that the next hour would determine the course of his employer’s life.
Hugo was going to fix this.
He was going to ride to Dover and find her carriage and stop it in the middle of the road if he must. He was going to stand in front of her and tell her the truth. All of it. The stammer and Sebastian and the marble floor and the woman who laughed and the father who turned away. He was going to open every locked door and let her walk through, and if she looked at him differently afterward, if the knowledge of what he was changed the way she saw him, then he would survive it. He had survived worse.
But he would not survive losing her. That much he knew.
The stable boy brought his horse. Hugo swung into the saddle and gathered the reins.
“The Dover road,” he said. “As fast as she can run.”
He kicked the horse forward, and the cobblestones blurred beneath him. London fell away behind him, and Hugo rode toward the woman he loved with his heart in his throat and no mask left to hide behind.
For the first time in his life, he did not need one.
CHAPTER 35
“Stop the carriage!”
Nell clutched the seat as the cab lurched to a halt. The horses stamped and snorted, and the driver’s muffled voice carried through the roof, sharp with irritation.
“There is a man in the road, Your Grace. On horseback. He is blocking the way. It looks like His Grace.”
Lily’s heart stopped.
She leaned toward the window and pushed the curtain aside. The Dover road stretched ahead, flat and gray beneath an overcast sky. The chalk cliffs were visible in the distance. And in the center of the road, astride a horse that was lathered and heaving, sat Hugo.
He looked nothing like the Duke of Thornwaite. His coat was unbuttoned and streaked with mud. His cravat was gone. Hisfair hair was damp with sweat and plastered to his forehead. His chest rose and fell with the ragged breathing of a man who had ridden hard and fast and had not stopped for anything.
He swung down from the saddle and walked toward the carriage. His boots were filthy. His shirt was untucked. There was a scratch across his left cheek where a branch must have caught him, and the careful, polished composure he wore like a second skin was nowhere to be seen.
He reached the window and looked at her. His amber eyes were raw, open, and terrified.
“Lily.” His voice was hoarse. “Give me a moment. That is all I ask. One moment.”
Nell pressed herself against the far side of the cab with the frozen expression of a maid who couldn’t fathom the possibility of a mud-covered Duke intercepting their journey.
Lily looked at Hugo. She looked at the road ahead, at the port in the distance, at the ship that would carry her to France and away from this man and the wreckage of everything they had built.
“One moment,” she said.
He opened the carriage door and offered her his hand. She took it. The warmth of his grip, familiar and solid, sent a tremor through her that she did not try to suppress.
He helped her down and guided her to the grassy verge beside the road, away from the carriage, away from Nell’s wide eyes and the driver’s confused stare. The wind from the Channel carried the salt smell of the sea, and the grass was damp beneath her feet. Hugo stood before her with his ruined clothes and his scratched face and nothing left to hide behind.
“You are right to leave,” he said. “I gave you every reason to go and not a single reason to stay. I know that. I have known it since the morning you walked out of our house, and I was not even there. I left before dawn so I would not have to watch you go, because I was too much of a coward to stand in that entrance hall and face what I had done. I let Mrs. Aldridge hand you an envelope and a set of travel documents as though that were enough. As though money could replace the words I should have spoken.”
“Hugo—”
