Page 9 of Bred By the Duke

Chapter Five

Rochelle

He says it and then he stops, which is the most maddening thing about him.

Nester shifts her weight and puts more of herself into my lap, which is a considerable amount of dog. I go on stroking her ear because it gives my hands somewhere to be. The tiles are cold through the blanket.

“Which time?” I ask.

There’s no hesitation. “Both.”

“You'll have to do better than that.” I keep my voice pleasant, because if I let it out of the pleasant register it will go somewhere I can't steer it. “You’ve had four years reach out to me. To say what you just said.”

He is quiet long enough that I think he might get up and leave again, and honestly it would almost be a relief, a return to known conditions.

“I was twenty-eight,” he says. “I'd had the title for two years and I still didn't know how to sit down in my own dining room. Everyone in the house that night was watching me to see how I was managing. My mother, my uncle, the Fitzhugh’s. Cassia was twenty-two and she'd only just stopped crying about losing our father.” He reaches over and strokes Nesters slender nose. “I wanted to return your shoes. You made a joke about the big bad duke, and I had spent eighteen months in that position, and for a second, I just wanted to be me.”

I shake my head softly. “That's a nice speech.”

“It isn't a speech.”

“It's very well organized for something you're making up on a laundry floor.” Nester's tail thumps twice, agreeing with me. “Go on. You kissed me and then you decided something. What did you decide?”

“That I had nothing to offer you past that night.”

“There it is.” I look at him properly for the first time since he sat down. He has his jacket off and his sleeves turned back. “Do you hear it? You decided. Not us. You had an entire conversation with yourself in the time it took for you to kiss me. Then you walked out and left me there without any explanation.”

“Would it have been better if I'd stayed and said it out loud?”

“It would have been kinder. I'd have had something to help me understand. To help me know this wasn’t because I was some terrible person or terrible kisser.” I move my hand from Nester's ear to the flat of her ribs, which rise and fall slowly under my palm. “You know what actually did it? Not the leaving. Breakfast.”

He looks at me.

“You came down at half past eight and passed me the toast rack, then asked whether I’d be leaving before midday as there was going to be snow.” I can still see the toast rack. Silver, with a hunting scene on the end of it, and my hands not steady enough to take it cleanly. “I sat there eating scrambled eggs on toast opposite a man who had kissed me like I meant something and I thought, oh. It didn't happen. He's decided it didn't happen, and now I have to eat this egg.”

He is looking at Nester but I see the way my words affect him. “I’m sorry.”

“Then you weren't at Cassia's birthday, or Easter Banquet, or the engagement party, or either of the last two Christmases.”

“No.”

I shake my head from side to side. “Go on. Say the rest of it.”

“I arranged not to be.” He says it evenly but there's a thread pulled tight underneath.

I laugh before I can help it, which is annoying, because I wanted to be formidable for at least another minute. “The spa,” I say.

“What?”

“Cassia's birthday, two years ago. I booked us into a spa forty miles from here because I couldn't face coming here. And the bed and breakfast by the lake, that was my idea too. I've been managing my own diary around you like a woman with a restraining order.”

He smiles. “Cassia told me about the scones.”

“She tells everyone about the scones.”

Nester groans and stretches out one enormous back leg until it presses against Lucas's thigh, and he puts his hand on it without appearing to notice he's doing it. We sit there for a moment, the two of us and the dog, in the yellow light of a lamp somebody carried in from the boot room.

“Last night,” I say.