Page 111 of A Mother for the Blind Duke’s Orphans

His throat moved. “There are things that cannot be made right by wanting them.”

She almost laughed, though nothing was funny. “How very like you.”

His brow furrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You make desire sound like an offense to be tried.”

“It can become one.”

“Not every feeling is a crime, Hector.”

Hector stood very still, as if she had touched him.

“But acting upon feelings may still be selfish.”

She studied him, not as the duke, nor the man who carried responsibility like armor, but as Hector. The guilt-ridden, stubborn, and honorable-to-the-point-of-cruelty man. He believed he was protecting her. She could see it with painful clarity. He had taken all the tenderness of the kiss and turned it into evidence against himself.

A kinder woman might have comforted him, and Poppy was kind. She had been kind for so long that people mistook it for limitlessness. But in that moment she felt nothing but angry.

“And what am I to do?” she asked.

His face turned toward her with sudden focus. “What do you mean?”

“If you decide closeness with your wife is selfish, and distance is protection, where does that leave me?”

He did not answer.

She continued, voice low because if she raised it she might lose command of it altogether. “Am I to be grateful for being kept safe from the very person I—” she stopped.

He clenched his jaw.

The unsaid word remained between them. It carried weight, but she would not give in to him now, not like this, not as another burden he could use to drive himself farther away.

“I am trying to do what is right,” he said.

“I believe you.”

“Then why do you look at me as if I have failed you?”

“Because perhaps you have,” she hissed.

Her words stunned them both.

Poppy had not known she believed them until they were spoken. Once said, they could not be retrieved. It stayed in the space between them, plain and terrible.

Hector’s voice was rough when he spoke again. “I never meant to fail you.”

“I know,” she said again, and this time the words were nearly unbearable because she truly believed him. “I know you never mean to. That is why it is so difficult to resent you.”

She saw him absorb that. Saw him fold it inward where he kept all his other wounds, labeled as proof.

A part of her wanted to cross the room and take his hand from the cane. To tell him he was not a danger merely because he wanted. But she had spent too much of her life trying to earn gentleness by being patient. She did not want to coax affection from a man determined to call it harm.

The realization came like a sudden dream. She wanted mornings that did not begin with guarded speech. She wanted to be looked for, not merely looked after. She wanted laughter that could survive mistakes, tenderness that did not retreat into apology, and a place where she belonged without proving she required little.

She wanted a home.

For a while, Poppy had allowed herself to imagine that place with Hector because beneath the reserve she had glimpsed devotion in its sternest form, and she had believed warmth might grow there if given time.