Page 57 of How Not to Marry a Duke

Then she closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock.

The click echoed in the small space—definitive, deliberate. She was not being imprisoned. She was not being locked away by someone else's hand. She was choosing this. Choosing solitude over society's expectations. Choosing the tower with its dust and its view and its absolute, impenetrable privacy.

Rapunzel had been locked in a tower by a witch.

Florinda was locking herself in by choice.

She was not certain which was worse.

* * *

The letter was beneath her mattress downstairs, but she did not need the paper to remember the words.

She had read them so many times that they were carved into her memory, indelible as scars. She sank onto the dusty settee—the fabric rough beneath her palms, the cushions flat from years of disuse—and let them rise unbidden.

Dearest, Darling Florinda. I have no right to write those words, but I feel I might die if I do not.

She traced the pattern of the settee's upholstery with her fingertip—faded roses, nearly invisible now beneath the dust.

I miss the weight of you in my arms. I miss the lavender in your hair. I miss the fourteen stairs, morning and evening, that were the only moments I allowed myself to want.

She had refused Lord Camberton because of this. Because of a letter that was never meant to be sent, from a man who was marrying someone else in a fortnight. She had thrown away security, respectability, the comfortable life that any sensible woman would have accepted—all because she could not make herself want the right man.

"I love him."

The words emerged as barely a breath, spoken to the empty room, to the dust motes floating in the afternoon light, to no one at all.

"I love him, and it does not matter."

Because he was marrying Penelope. Because honour demanded it. Because the contract was signed and the ball was planned and in ten days she would stand in a crowded room and watch him pledge himself to another woman.

And then it would be over. The hoping. The counting. The terrible, wonderful possibility that had lived beneath her ribs since she had woken in his arms and felt, for one suspended moment, that she was exactly where she belonged.

All of it would end.

Outside the tower windows, the sun was setting over Carthedge land, painting the sky in shades of gold and rose. The cold crept through the glass, through her sleeves, into her bones.

Fourteen gold threads, she thought. That was what he had counted, that first day in the garden. Fourteen gold threads in her hair.

She wondered if he was counting still.

* * *

Margot came to the tower door at dusk.

Florinda heard her footsteps on the narrow stairs—fourteen, her mind counted, always counting now—heard the soft knock, heard the gentle voice asking to be let in.

She did not answer. She sat on the dusty settee with her knees drawn to her body and her arms wrapped around them, watching the last light fade from the sky.

"Florinda." Margot's voice came muffled through the oak. "Please. I am not angry. I am frightened for you."

"I know." Her own voice emerged hoarse, scraped raw from crying she did not remember doing. "I am frightened too."

"Then let me in. Let me help."

"You cannot help. No one can." She stared at the locked door, at the barrier she had placed between herself and everyone who loved her. "I have to feel this, Margot. I have to let it hurt. And I cannot do that with people watching, waiting for me to be sensible, hoping I shall recover quickly enough to accept the next suitable offer."

A long silence.