Page 13 of How Not to Marry a Duke

He closed the door behind him and stood for a moment in the silence.

Kippers.

She had offered him kippers.

He moved to the window, pressing his palm against the cool glass. Outside, the gardens stretched in orderly rows—hedges trimmed, paths raked, every bloom in its appointed place. His life was meant to be like those gardens. Arranged. Maintained. Appropriate.

He was going to marry Lady Penelope Ashworth. He was going to produce heirs and manage estates and attend Parliament and do all the things a duke was expected to do. He would be content. Content was sufficient. Content was safe.

This was the life he had chosen.

Except he had not chosen it, had he? His mother had chosen Penelope. His father had negotiated the initial terms before his death. The contract had been drawn up by solicitors who had never asked Frederick what he wanted, only what was owed. He had signed because signing was expected, because dukes did not refuse advantageous matches on the grounds that they felt nothing.

Nothing was not a complaint. Nothing was merely... nothing.

He thought of Florinda's scream when he had lifted her. The way her fingers had clutched his waistcoat. The way she had said his name—Frederick—as though she knew him, as though nine years and a hundred formal introductions had not intervened since a stable and a summer afternoon.

He had felt everything on that road. Terror. Desperation. The animal need to protect what was his, though she was not his, had never been his, could never be his.

It had not been nothing.

Frederick turned from the window and crossed to his desk. He opened a drawer, retrieved paper, uncapped the inkwell. He did not know what he intended to write. A letter to Edward, perhaps, with further details of the incident. A note to his steward regarding household arrangements for their unexpected guest.

He picked up his pen.

And began to write.

* * *

I do not know why I am writing this.

You are upstairs in the blue guest chamber with your leg in a splint and laudanum dulling whatever pain the surgeon could not prevent. You will not read this. You must not read this. I am writing it only because I cannot seem to make my hands stop moving, and this is preferable to returning to the breakfast room and listening to my mother discuss charity whilst my fiancée offers restorative fish.

I counted your heartbeats against my chest. Seventy-three per minute. Too fast. Or perhaps that was mine. I could not tell where you ended and I began. This is not a thing I should admit, even to paper no one will ever see.

Two thousand eight hundred and forty-seven steps. I did not mean to count them. I never mean to count anything. It simply happens—the numbers arranging themselves in my head like soldiers forming ranks, giving order to things that have no order, making bearable what should not be borne.

You called me Frederick. Not 'Your Grace.' Not the title I have hidden behind for nine years. You called me by my name as though you remembered using it, as though a stable and a summer afternoon and a kiss conducted for scientific purposes still lived somewhere in your memory.

I am engaged to be married. I am hosting a party to celebrate that engagement. I am doing everything a duke is supposed to do. And I am sitting in my study writing letters I will never send to a woman I have no right to think about, because this morning I discovered that 'nothing' is not the same as 'content,' and content is not the same as alive, and I have not felt alive in longer than I can remember.

This changes nothing. It must change nothing.

But I am writing it down anyway, because if I do not put these words somewhere, I think they might eat me from the inside out.

* * *

Frederick read what he had written.

Then he folded the paper, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and placed it inside.

He had correspondence to answer. Guests to greet. A fiancée to attend to with appropriate devotion. The surgeon would return this afternoon to check on Lady Florinda, and Frederick would need to be informed of her progress, and he would receive that information with the polite concern of a host and nothing more.

He closed the drawer.

Outside, the gardens remained in their orderly rows. Inside, Frederick's carefully constructed numbness had developed a crack he could not quite ignore.

He pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him and began composing a proper letter to his steward about bedding and meals and all the appropriate arrangements for an invalid guest who would be staying several weeks.