He had not said them to her.
Not in this room. Not without witness. Not as a choice made freely, without purpose or audience or consequence beyond the two of them.
Her gaze dropped to the trunk again. She did not reach for it.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor.
She knew his footsteps. Had catalogued them over three months—the measured ducal stride for public corridors, the quicker pace when he was agitated, the near-silent tread of a man accustomed to moving without notice. These were none of those.
These were uneven. Too fast. Checked only at the last moment, as though he had forced himself to slow before reaching her door.
They stopped outside.
Silence. One breath. Two.
The knock, when it came, bore no resemblance to his usual summons—no measured restraint, no careful authority. A single strike. Open-palmed. Urgent. Not a request, but something nearer to need.
Lorraine’s hands tightened into fists. She straightened slowly, gathering herself, pressing her lips together to still their trembling.
“Come in.”
The door opened.
Dominic Vane stood in the threshold—and he looked wrecked.
Not disordered in the careless way of a man at ease, but undone. The composure was gone—entirely. The distance, the control, the polished ducal reserve stripped away so completely that for a moment, he seemed almost unfamiliar. His cravat was missing. His waistcoat hung open. His hair fell across his forehead, as though he had dragged his hands through it repeatedly and abandoned the effort to contain it. And his eyes—
His eyes were unguarded. Bright. Fractured open with something that looked dangerously like fear.
He looked at her.
Then at the trunk.
“Don’t go.”
Two words. Stripped bare. Roughened by urgency. The voice of a man who had arrived at the edge of something and chosen, at last, not to step back.
Lorraine’s hands clenched at her sides.
“You told me to.”
“I was wrong.”
He crossed the threshold. The room seemed to contract around him—the narrow bed, the plain furnishings, the smallness of it—until there was only him, filling the space with heat and presence and something that felt dangerously like inevitability.
“I was a coward,” he said. “You were right. You have been right about everything since the day you walked into this house, and I have been wrong about all of it—about Thomas, about myself, about you.”
He came closer, each step measured now, as though he were approaching something that might vanish if he moved too quickly.
“I know I was right.” Her voice held, just. “I did not require four hours to determine it.”
A flicker—brief, almost disbelieving—touched his expression. Not quite humour, but something like it.
“It was nearer five,” he said. “And not solitary. I spent the first three with Thomas. The fourth with Graves—who informed me, with considerable restraint,that Miss Weston was in her room.” His gaze flicked once, deliberately, to the trunk. “Packing.”
“Because you told me to.”
“Because I am an idiot.”
