Page 114 of A Duchess for his Family

Perhaps she altered him in precisely the same way, not dramatically, not all at once, with a laugh here, a disagreement there, her hand on his sleeve, her voice in the nursery, her books beside his papers. Her warmth threaded quietly through the structure of his days until he could no longer tell where duty ended and wanting began.

“I knew what I was offering her,” Benedict sighed. “Security. A home. The girls. A position she could make her own.”

Nathaniel watched him carefully. “And what were you offering yourself?”

Benedict gave a humorless laugh. “Nothing.”

“That seems unlike you. You generally negotiate better.”

“This was never about me.”

Nathaniel pointed a knowing finger. “That does sound like you.”

Benedict’s thought of Sophia saying good night in the garden. The desire itself was manageable. Benedict was not a boy. Physical attraction could be governed. He understood appetite. He understood restraint.

It was everything surrounding it that frightened him. It was the tenderness, the ease, the almost unbearable awareness that she trusted him enough to lean closer rather than away, and finally, the terrifying little thought that entered him as Sophia sat beside him in the dark garden, that perhaps this could be his life… not merely the girls, not merely Rivermere.

Her.

He imagined permanence without realizing he had done so. And permanence was a dangerous thing to desire.

Nathaniel rose. The leather chair gave a soft creak as it released his weight.

“When we were twenty,” he said, “you once told me you would never marry unless there were an excellent practical reason.”

“I remember.”

“I told you that was the least romantic declaration any man had made since Henry VIII.”

Benedict gave him a warning look, but Nathaniel did not smile.

“You have spent years arranging your life so that nothing can surprise you,” Nathaniel continued. “The estate. The girls. Your obligations. Even grief, when it came, was given a place to stand.”

Benedict stiffened. Nathaniel saw it.

His voice softened. “I am not mocking you.”

“I know.”

That made it worse. Benedict looked toward the windows. Beyond them, the lawn shone wet beneath the newly emerging sun. A breeze stirred the upper branches of the old elm, shaking droplets loose from the leaves. They fell in brief silver flashes.

He buried too many people. Each loss taught him the same lesson in a different voice: nothing beloved remained merely because one needed it to.

Love never proved itself gentle merely because people spoke of it as though it were. Love was exposure. It placed another living person somewhere inside oneself and then trusted the world not to tear them out.

Benedict learned the folly of that trust. He remembered standing beside his brother’s coffin, thinking that grief had to possess a limit because a man could surely not endure more than what he already felt. Then he discovered that grief possessed no such courtesy. There was always room for another loss. He survived by becoming useful where he could not be hopeful.

Rules.

Duty.

Protection.

Those things could be done. They could be measured, corrected, and repeated. Love could only be endured.

“I cannot do this again,” he said.

Nathaniel’s face changed. The words emerged more quietly than Benedict intended. Perhaps because they were not truly about Sophia, or not only about Sophia.