For Three Months, She Poured Her Heart Into Letters to an Unknown Soldier Who Never Read a Single One — But a Scarred Duke Read Every Word, Memorized Her Heart, and Crossed a London Ballroom to Find Her

PART 4

The morning after the Earl of Stanhope’s ball, Aurora felt entirely unmoored.

She sat at the breakfast table pushing a piece of cold toast around a porcelain plate. Her father, Viscount Richard Holloway, was reading the Morning Post with the singular aggressive focus of a man deeply concerned with the gambling debts of his peers. He had not noticed his daughter had slept exactly two hours.

She felt as though her skin had been peeled back. For a year, those letters had been a vault — her grief, her sharp edges, her resentment against a society that treated women like decorative livestock, all buried into the muddy abyss of the Continent.

Now the abyss was sitting in her parlor. Wearing impeccable tailoring.

At exactly eleven o’clock, the heavy brass knocker sounded. Three minutes later, the butler materialized in the dining room looking faintly terrified.

“The Duke of Westmore to see Miss Holloway.”

The viscount dropped his newspaper into his eggs. “A duke?” he sputtered, his eyes darting to Aurora in a mix of shock and sudden frantic calculation. “Here for you?”

“It would appear so, Father.”

She stood. Her knees felt like water; she locked them into place. She smoothed the front of her modest morning gown — a dull, unremarkable slate gray — and called up the fortress she had been building since she was ten years old.

“I will receive him in the library.”

She did not rush. She walked deliberately, brick by brick. When she entered, Alistair was standing by the fireplace. Not looking at the mantle clock, not studying the landscapes. He was staring out the window at the bleak London street, hands clasped firmly behind his back.

In daylight, he looked harsher. The lines of his jaw were pronounced, the exhaustion around his eyes carved deep. He wore a dark navy riding coat that swallowed the light in the room. He turned when the door closed. He did not bow. He simply looked at her.

“You look as though you are preparing for an execution, Miss Holloway.”

“I am merely bracing myself for whatever extortion you have planned, Your Grace.” She moved to a velvet armchair but refused to sit — she needed the height. “A man who reads another man’s mail is capable of anything, I imagine.”

His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Close.

“I did not come to extort you. I came to apologize.”

She stopped. She had expected arrogant teasing. She had expected him to leverage his title, his knowledge of her secrets. She had not expected him to stand in her oppressively feminine sitting room and surrender.

“I violated your privacy.” His gray eyes locked onto hers. He did not look away. He did not blink. “I took something that was not meant for me, and I kept it. I could give you a dozen excuses — the mud, the noise, the sheer unending terror of the campaign. But the truth is much simpler. I read them because I was drowning, and you threw me a rope. I am sorry for the theft. I cannot bring myself to be sorry for the survival.”

Aurora stared at him. The sheer unvarnished honesty of it knocked the breath from her lungs. She was used to men who spoke in circles, who flattered and deflected. This man spoke like a hammer hitting an anvil.

Before she could respond, a heavy coal wagon clattered past the townhouse window. The iron wheels struck a deep pothole with a sound like a cannon shot.

Alistair flinched.

Not a small movement. His entire body jerked, shoulders drawing up, his hand dropping sharply toward his left hip — where a sword would rest. His breathing hitched, shallow and fast. He stared at the window, eyes wide and unfocused, seeing something entirely different than a London street.

Aurora moved without thinking. She crossed the room in three steps. She didn’t speak — she knew better than to shout at a man trapped inside his own head. She reached out and placed her palm flat against the center of his chest. Over his heart.

“You are in Mayfair,” she said. Firm. Steady. Low. “It is a coal wagon. You are in a sitting room that smells offensively of potpourri, and you are entirely safe.”

He blinked. The gray slowly came back into focus, shifting from the smoke of Waterloo to the pale light of London. He looked down at the small pale hand resting against his dark coat. He could feel the heat of her palm through the wool. He let out a long, ragged breath, his shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch.

“My apologies,” he rasped, stepping back so her hand fell away. He looked deeply ashamed, a dark flush creeping up his neck. “The noise. It catches me off guard.”

“My brother used to flinch when the hounds barked too loudly at the manor, after he returned from his first tour.” She folded her hands tight at her waist so he wouldn’t see them shake. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

Alistair looked at her. The cynicism that usually armored her face was gone. In its place was a quiet, profound understanding.

“Edward,” he said.

Aurora stiffened.

“You know his name?”

“You wrote about him in your fifth letter. You said he had a terrible habit of laughing at inappropriate moments during sermons.” His voice was gentle. “You said you missed that laugh more than you missed God.”

She closed her eyes. The memory of writing that sentence in the dead of night stung her.

“You remember entirely too much.”

“I remember every word.” He took a step toward her. The air between them charged, crackling with some invisible current. “I am not here to haunt you with them, Aurora. I am here because the woman who wrote those letters is the only person in this godforsaken city who makes any sense to me. Allow me to call on you properly.”

She opened her eyes. The scarred, haunted duke stood in her parlor. A terrible prospect. Damaged. Intense. He knew entirely too much about the ugliest parts of her soul.

“You may call on me,” she said, barely above a whisper. “On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“No flowers.” Her old defensive dryness crept back in. “If you bring me a bouquet of symbolic roses, I will lock the door.”

Alistair finally smiled. A real, unguarded expression that transformed his harsh face into something arresting.

“No flowers. You have my word.”

He left. Standing at the sitting-room window, watching his carriage pull away, Aurora realized a moment too late that she was smiling — and that the smile terrified her more than anything he had said.

Society, of course, was a predator that fed on novelty. And the Duke of Westmore’s sudden interest in the notoriously difficult Miss Holloway was novelty of the most delicious kind.