“Finish it,” she murmured.
“Not a wise request.”
“Why not?”
“Because the answer is not fit for polite conversation in a moving carriage.”
“I doubt it would shock me.”
“Celine—”
“I am not a naïve girl fresh from the schoolroom. I am your wife.”
“My wife in name only.”
“By your insistence.”
“By necessity,” he corrected, raking a hand through his hair until it lost its perfect order. “If I allowed myself to touch you now—truly touch you—I would not trust myself to stop. That is the truth of it. And you deserve… better restraint than mine presently is.”
“Or perhaps I want less restraint.”
A sound escaped him—half laugh, half strangled breath. “You are determined to undo every scrap of sense I possess.”
“Or to coax you into admitting you have feelings beneath all that iron control.”
He drew a slow breath, straightened, and—almost visibly—set the conversation back on its rails.
“The ball,” he said, clearing his throat. “We were discussing the ball.”
She recognised the retreat but allowed him the escape. For now.
“Yes. The politics. The players. What else must I understand?”
“The Duke of Haverford is one of my few actual friends—if friendship exists in any meaningful form among the ton.”
A slight pause. “His wife, however, despises me.”
“Why?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.
He looked out the carriage window, the countryside blurring past.
“Because she loved my mother. And she believes, rightly or not, that I contributed to her decline.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? I was sixteen, angry at the world, determined to prove I was nothing like my father by being exactly like him—passionate, uncontrolled, dangerous.”
“You were a child who’d lost his father in the worst possible way.”
“I was old enough to know better.”
She reached for his hand, intertwining their fingers despite his initial resistance. “You were in pain.”
“Pain doesn’t excuse cruelty.”
“Were you cruel?”
He was quiet for a long moment. “I was careless. With money, with people’s feelings, with my mother’s health. I thought if I could just feel enough, do enough, be enough, it would fill the hollow place my father’s death had left.”
