The heat of moments before drained from him.
No more.
Gideon was finished with secrets. With hiding. With pretending that postponing the inevitable would make it any easier to bear.
But before he could confess anything—before he could make anything right—he needed Dash back in the room. Not this hollow-eyed ghost. His friend. The duke. The brother Beatrice needed. The man more than one household depended upon.
Resting his arms on his knees, Gideon leaned forward.
“You need to stop,” he said.
The words came low. Hard. Final.
Dash’s attention snapped to him.
Good. Let him see… Let him rage, if that was what it took.
Beatrice drew a quick breath beside him. “Dash…” Her voice was thinner than usual, but steadying by the second. “Please, sit down.”
Dash did not sit. He paced in front of the door like a restless tiger.
Gideon kept his eyes on Dash, but he felt the change in Beatrice all the same. The tension gathering in her.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said. “You don’t eat. You don’t sleep. I hear you pacing the corridors half the night.”
Her voice caught, only slightly.
“This has gone too far.”
“She’s right, my friend.” Gideon’s voice softened, but not much. Dash did not need softness. Not now. “You’ve driven yourself to the edge over this.”
Dash whipped around, mouth twisted. “Have I?”
“Yes,” Gideon said. “And everyone in this house knows it.” He forced himself not to glance over at Beatrice. If he did, he risked being thrown back to those moments before Dash interrupted them.
“Don’t you think perhaps it is time to let her go?” Beatrice asked gently.
Dash laughed, a short, sharp, ugly sound that made Gideon’s jaw tighten.
“Let her go?” Dash repeated. “You speak as though it were so simple.”
“I know it isn’t simple,” said Beatrice. Gideon heard the strain beneath her composure. “But you’re destroying yourself. And still, she has not chosen you.”
“You don’t know,” he growled. “You’ve no idea what passes between us.”
“Do you?” Beatrice asked.
Dash stared at her as though she had slapped him.
“I can’t expect…” He shook his head once, his hand curling at his side. “Two years. I was gone for two years. Of course it will take time to repair things after?—”
He broke off.
Gideon rose, walked across the room, and set a hand on Dash’s shoulder.
It was a familiar gesture. One he had used a hundred times to pull Dash back from one cliff or another. But this time, guilt moved beneath it.
Dash didn’t know that Gideon’s loyalty to him had become complicated by something else, something fiercer: guilt, desire, duty, and the feelings he had failed—spectacularly—to control.
