The carriage ride home passed in silence. Not the fraught, defensive silence of the journey there—a different species. Thissilence had weight to it. Substance. It sat between them like a third passenger, breathing quietly, taking up more room than either was prepared to acknowledge.
At Rath House, Tristan handed her down. His fingers held hers for the duration of the step, and when he released her hand, his thumb grazed the inside of her wrist. Whether by accident or design she could not tell. She did not ask. Some questions were safer left unopened.
At the foot of the staircase, they stopped.
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
“Goodnight.”
She climbed the stairs without looking back. She counted every step—twenty-three, the same number she had descended hours ago—and on the fourteenth, she heard him exhale. A sound so quiet it should not have carried.
It did.
She closed her chamber door. Pressed her back against it and stood in the dark with the ghost of his hand still warm at her waist.
She was not afraid of the Duke of Rathbourne. She had established this weeks ago, confirmed it daily.
She was afraid of the waltz. Of the way her body had remembered what to do only after it stopped listening to her mind. Of the way he had looked at her—not as a man looks at a debt he is repaying, or an obligation he is enduring—but as a man looks at the one thing in a burning room he would carry out first.
It was a dance. One dance. It meant nothing.
But her hands were trembling, and the thought that arrived next—unbidden, unwelcome, so dangerous she stopped breathing when it formed—was simply this:
What if he had not let go?
* * *
Two floors below, Tristan stood at the window of his unlit study and did not pour the brandy he had reached for.
The glass sat on the sideboard. Untouched. He had lifted the decanter, tipped it, and set it down without completing the motion—arrested by the realisation that what he wanted was not something alcohol could provide.
He had felt her relax. That was the splinter he could not pull free. The precise moment during the waltz when her shoulders had softened and her body had stopped fighting his and simplymoved with him, as though the resistance she had maintained for weeks had been a door held shut against a wind that had finally proved stronger.
This changes nothing. She is under your protection. Not your possession.
He would not act on it. He would not touch her again, except as duty required. He would carry this silently, completely, without asking anyone to share the weight.
Sleep did not come. He did not expect it to.
The morning arrived too soon, and brought with it the sound of raised voices from the servants’ hall.
CHAPTER 15
“Your Grace, I must speak with you. It concerns a matter among the staff.”
Mrs Alcott stood in the doorway of Tristan’s study at a quarter past six, her cap slightly crooked and her colour high—two details that, separately, would have been unremarkable, but together constituted a state of emergency in a woman whose composure had survived nineteen years of Rathbourne service without visible damage.
Tristan set down the pen he had been holding for twenty minutes without writing a word. He had not slept. The brandy on the sideboard remained untouched—poured hours ago, abandoned immediately, because the ritual of pouring had been enough and the drinking would have helped nothing. His coat from the previous evening still lay across the chair where he had dropped it upon returning from the ball, and he had not picked it up, and he was not going to think about why he had not picked it up.
“Speak.”
“Mr Barrow, Your Grace. The senior footman.” Mrs Alcott clasped her hands before her—tightly, the knuckles blanched. “He has been collecting sums from several of the junior staff. A shilling here, sixpence there—levied as fines for minor infractions. Broken crockery. Lateness. Mislaid linens.” She drew a breath that cost her something. “The infractions did not exist. He invented them. And when young Mary questioned the charge, he told her she could pay or find herself dismissed without character. She is seventeen, Your Grace. Her mother in Spitalfields depends upon her wages entirely.”
Tristan’s hand, resting flat on the desk, went still.
“How long.”
“At least four months. Perhaps longer. The girls were too frightened to come forward.” Mrs Alcott’s voice held steady, but the muscle beneath her left eye had begun to jump. “I discovered it only this morning, when one of the kitchen maids broke down during the early preparations. She had been paying Barrow two shillings a week—nearly a third of her earnings—for an offence she swears she never committed.”
