“He asked the Dowager to keep it from you. He did not ask me. He said he did not want it to count as a chip in any apology he owed you. He said he wanted me to have a season, not a transaction.”
She went upstairs, opened the drawer and looked at the five unopened letters, which had been sent back to her.
She read them all that night. In order, by candlelight, sitting at her uncle’s desk with the two Crébillon volumes beside her and the apple orchard dark outside the window. They were not pleas. They were not apologies. They were accountings. Each letter named one thing he had done wrong, in order, without asking forgiveness.
She read them all, slept and woke with a decision.
She sent a note to the inn. She would see him at three in the afternoon in her uncle’s library. She would see him for one hour. Bethany and Cassie were not to be present.
***
At three o’clock, the housekeeper showed him in.
He stood in the doorway of the library, and she saw what ten days at the inn had done to him. He was thinner. The coat was loose at the shoulders, and the jaw she had traced with her fingers in the cottage was sharper, the hollows beneath his cheekbones deeper, and there was a small bandage at his temple where Mrs. Patton had dressed a cut from when he fell against the inn writing desk three days into not eating. He was pale. He was gaunt. He was the most honest-looking man she had ever seen, because the honesty was carved into his body, visible in every lost pound, every sleepless shadow and every line that exhaustion had drawn across his face.
He was not performing. He had stopped performing. The man standing in the doorway of her uncle’s library was not the Duke of Ravenhurst the ton had known for eight years. He wassomeone else. Someone thinner, quieter and more frightened, a man who had dismantled every structure he had ever built and was standing in the rubble of it asking to be seen.
“Sit down,” she said.
He sat, and she sat across from him.
The reckoning that followed was long. She asked every question she had, and he answered without performance.
“What did you tell Devlin about the conservatory?”
“He pressed, and I gave him something to keep him satisfied. I just said you surprised me. All the rest is his own doing, and to this day I do not know how he found out.”
“Why did you stay next to me the night he trapped me?”
“Because for the first time in my life, I knew exactly which person in a room I belonged beside. There was nothing else to do.”
“Why did you ask the Dowager to keep Cassie a secret?”
“Because I did not want a single thing I did to be something you could weigh against the wager. I wanted to give you something that could not be measured.”
“Why did you not tell me that night that you had been to your solicitor?”
“Because I wanted to ask you in front of every person who had ever ignored you, and I needed twenty-four hours to arrange it. Twenty-four hours was the most expensive mistake I have ever made.”
“Why did you let me give myself to you with the wager still active?”
He did not answer for a long time.
“Because I wanted you,” he said. His voice was low, rough, stripped of everything except the words themselves. “Because I told myself the wager was a paper thing and that what was between us was a real thing, and that the paper would not touch the real. Because I was a coward who should have walked outof your bedroom and told you everything before I touched you. Because I have spent eight years taking what I wanted, and I did not know how to stop.” He paused. “There is no answer that makes it bearable. You should not forgive me for it. I have not forgiven myself.”
She listened, did not interrupt and asked her last question.
“Why did you lose so much weight?”
He did not answer.
She rose, lifted her hand to his face and found the hollow under his cheekbone, and her hand rested there. He closed his eyes.
“Take out the watch.”
He took it from his waistcoat pocket, opened it and showed her the small portrait.
She looked at his mother’s face for a long time and thought of her own mother, who had died when Imogen was fourteen, and of how she had not had anyone to ask for advice since. She wondered what his mother would have said about the Carlisle ball, and what her own mother would have said about the bedroom, and whether there was any forgiveness in either of them for the people they raised.
