“Mine, and yours… for now.”
She frowned. “With no explanation?”
“Yes.”
“With strangers circling the house and gossip gathering at every window?”
His voice hardened. “The child is not mine.”
“I know you have said so.”
“It is the truth,” he repeated over and over again, though with little effect.
“Then whose is she?” she demanded.
Andrew’s silence answered as firmly as speech. Frances looked at him as though he had struck the last thread of patience from her.
“I cannot tell you,” he echoed. “You have to trust me.”
“No.” Her reply came at once, fierce and bright. “No, Your Grace. Silence is not a cloak you may throw over my shoulders and call it protection.”
He drew back slightly, not in movement, but in feeling. For the first time since Lady Ashford had left, something in her anger burned clean through his own.
Frances stood before him with her hands curled at her sides, and with her green eyes alive with hurt she would have rather died than name. She was not merely offended or inconvenienced by this. She was furious because he had asked her to stand beside him while refusing to let her know what shadow she stood in.
And perhaps, in some merciless corner of himself, Andrew knew she was right.
Her voice trembled, though not with weakness. “Trust must be earned.”
Andrew said nothing. Of course, he said nothing. Silence seemed to be his preferred fortress, the place to which he retreated whenever the truth came too near. Frances saw it happen before her very eyes: the closing of his expression, the tightening of his mouth, the stillness that settled over him like armor.
A moment ago, he had been angry. Now he was something worse…untouchable.
“Not demanded,” she continued, because if she stopped speaking, she feared she might choke on all the words he refused to give her. “Not assumed, not hidden behind a title, or a marriage contract, or some noble silence you have decided must excuse everything.”
His eyes remained on hers, blue, cold and unreadable. Perhaps not entirely unreadable, for Frances had begun, against her better judgment, to learn the small betrayals in his face. She knew the difference between indifference and restraint. She knew when his temper sharpened and when some older pain moved beneath it.
She knew now that his silence was not empty. It was crowded with things he would not say. That only made it worse.
“You ask me to stand beside you,” she told him. “You ask me to bear the name, the looks, the questions, the whispers. You ask me to smile at women like Lady Ashford while they prod at this house as though it were a sealed box they mean to pry open. And still, when I ask what danger I am facing, what secret I am meant to protect, you give me nothing.”
“I am trying to protect–”
“Whom?” she demanded. “The child? Yourself? Me? Or the secret?”
He went still.
There. She had struck something. Frances felt it with a sudden, almost dreadful certainty. The air between them changed. It was a small thing, nothing another person might have noticed, but she did. She saw the way his eyes sharpened, the way the careful control of his shoulders became too deliberate. It was a secret with edges sharp enough to make even Andrew recoil from naming it.
“You see?” she said more softly. “This is precisely why I cannot simply trust you.”
He looked at her for one long moment. For a breath, Frances thought he might answer. She had not expected miracles from him, but perhaps he might give her one true thing, one solid piece of ground beneath her feet.
Instead, Andrew bowed. It was not the bow he offered in drawing rooms, smooth and charming enough to disarm even the most determined dowager. It was not the polite inclination he gave her when he was amused and wished to irritate her by appearing perfectly composed.
This bow was formal and distant. It placed an entire ballroom between them though they stood only a few feet apart.
Frances hated it immediately.
