Page 87 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Eat your supper, Charles,” he said.

He could feel Alice’s gaze, sharp and searching. She had been given another piece of the text she had been assembling for months.

“Freddie, Charlie.” Her voice was warm. “Which chapter tonight? We left the dragon in rather dire straits, if I recall correctly.”

Freddie pivoted with immediate and total enthusiasm. Charlie did not. He watched his father a moment longer, quiet and searching, and then returned to his plate.

Alice tried to meet Kenneth’s eyes, but he avoided her gaze entirely. It took everything she had in her not to huff out a breath or scream at him.

Three days ago, he had pressed her against the shelf of folded sheets in the linen closet, put his mouth to the hollow at the base of her throat, and felt her pulse kick against his lips, before pulling away and apologizing.

Two days ago, his thumb had traced the inside of her wrist beneath the breakfast table, slow and deliberate, and she had turned her hand palm-up in his, and he had not accepted it.

Yesterday, he had stood close enough in the corridor to catch the scent of her hair, verbena and warmth, and she had looked up at him expecting what the attic had promised. But he had stepped back, and her expression had moved through something he would rather not have caused.

Alice did not fail to observe patterns.

Miss Leyton collected the boys at eight. Alice said goodnight and left, and Kenneth tracked her footsteps down the corridor and up the stairs, each one measured, and the tracking said more than he intended.

The knock came at half past ten. He had been sitting in the chair beside the window with a book open to a page he could not have identified under oath.

“Come in.”

She opened the door. Her cotton nightgown was buttoned to her throat—intended as modesty, he suspected—though the fabric fell over the full curve of her hips and the dip of her waist. It was enough to give his imagination what it needed to fill in what the cotton concealed, and the imagining was becoming a discipline he was losing.

She closed the door and stood with her back against it. “Kenneth.”

“You should sleep.”

“You have been pulling away from me.” She said it with composure she must have been rehearsing since supper. “You held my hand beneath the table and left the room before the dishes were cleared away. You stood so close in the corridor that I could feel your breath on my temple, and then you stepped back. You kissed me in the linen closet, and then you apologized. And then at dinner, you couldn’t even look at me.” Her arms crossed, pressing the cotton against her ribs. “And I can still feel it, Kenneth. Your mouth on my throat. I have been feeling it for three days, and you have been across every room from me, and I cannot…” She stopped. Her jaw closed on the rest.

The flush that climbed her neck was visible even by candlelight, and he watched her gather herself with a care that cost her.

“Something is wrong.” Her voice was steadier now. “I would rather you told me what it is than continue to wonder whether I am the cause.”

“You are not the cause.”

“Then tell me.”

He set the book down and looked at his hands, because looking at her was not possible while he said what he was going to say. Hands that had held his sons on the day they were born and closed his first wife’s eyes and lifted Alice from a chair in an attic and set her down with a care that frightened him.

“Theresa was well when she conceived,” he began.

Alice went still at the door.

“The physician found nothing to concern him. She complained of tiredness, and the tiredness became something else. I did not attend to it properly until attending was no longer sufficient.” He paused. His voice had the staleness of something not spoken aloud in eight years. “The labor lasted two days. The physicians told me the presentation was wrong, that there were two babies, that the situation had become dangerous. I stood in the corridor outside her door and listened to her for the better part of a night and could do nothing except stand there.”

The candle flame leaned in the draught from the window.

“She was dead before dawn. The boys were alive. I held them both in one arm because they were so small, and she was in the room behind me with the door still open.” His voice was steady, but the effort was audible. “The first thought, before the grief or the guilt or anything I learned to carry after, was: I put her there.”

He breathed out.

“I will not risk it.” He looked up. She was still at the door, her eyes bright, her hand gripping the fabric of her nightgown. “I cannot put you in that room. I cannot stand in that corridor again and listen and know that I am the reason.”

His jaw tightened, and the pressure of it registered in his temples, the cost of saying a thing he had arranged his entire life around not saying.

“And I will not bring another child into a house where their father locks himself in his study because he does not know how to be in a room with the people he loves without governing them.”