He was the most disciplined man in England, until his own wife whispered four words that shattered him entirely: “I can’t take it.” What she meant, and what he heard, were not the same thing at all.

PART 3

By the third week of her marriage, Eleanor had begun arriving late to breakfast. It was not a habit she had ever possessed before Blackthorne Hall. Her father had prized punctuality above nearly every other virtue, and she had been raised to appear at table a full quarter hour before any meal commenced, hair dressed, composure fixed. Now she found herself hurrying down the staircase with pins still loose, murmuring apologies to a husband who did not appear remotely troubled by her tardiness — and who, if anything, seemed to take a private and infuriating satisfaction in the flush that rose to her cheeks each time he caught her crossing the breakfast room.

“You needn’t rush on my account,” he said one morning, rising as she took her seat, his mouth curved with the particular half-smile that had become, in these three weeks, entirely too familiar to her pulse. “I find I rather enjoy the sight of my wife disheveled.”

“Your grace is unkind to remark upon it.”

“Alexander,” he corrected, for perhaps the hundredth time, and reached across the small distance between their chairs to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear with a gentleness that made the reprimand she had prepared entirely evaporate from her tongue.

The truth, which she admitted to no one, not even herself, until she absolutely could not avoid it, was that she had begun each night anticipating the moment he would appear at the connecting door. And each night that anticipation was rewarded with an ardor that left her, by morning, thoroughly and happily undone in every sense but rested. He was tireless in a manner she had not known a man could be tireless, his appetite for her seemingly inexhaustible, renewed by the smallest glimpse of her — a low laugh across the dinner table, the way she bit her lip over a demanding sum in the household ledgers, the sight of her bare shoulder when her dressing gown slipped as she read by the fire.

She did not, in those early weeks, think to object. How could she object to being wanted so completely by a man the whole of London had assumed too disciplined to want anything at all? There was a heady, almost drunken pleasure in discovering herself the singular object of Alexander Ashford’s famous restraint, entirely abandoned. She told herself the exhaustion was a small price, hardly worth mentioning, certainly not worth risking the fragile new warmth between them by admitting she sometimes longed quite desperately simply to sleep.

The household began to notice before she was willing to admit anything herself. She caught two housemaids exchanging a glance over the breakfast linens one morning as she stifled a yawn behind her hand, and felt her face heat with an embarrassment sharper than any she had known since her first London season. Mrs. Pruitt, ever observant, took to sending up strong coffee unasked each morning alongside her chocolate — a small kindness that somehow made the whole situation feel more exposed rather than less.

“You needn’t look so mortified, my lady,” the housekeeper said one morning, catching her stricken expression as the coffee tray arrived unrequested for the third day running. “This house has stood two hundred years. It has seen a great deal more than a young couple too fond of one another to sleep.” There was no judgment in her voice, only a dry, weathered amusement that made Eleanor laugh despite herself. “His late grace’s own parents were much the same, by all accounts, in their first year. It is not a flaw in you, my lady, whatever your upbringing may have taught you to fear.”

The words lodged somewhere in Eleanor’s chest and would not entirely dislodge. Not a flaw in you. And yet if it were not a flaw, she could not quite account for the growing unease that shadowed even her happiest hours — a small, persistent voice suggesting that a better wife, a stronger one, would not feel this particular exhaustion at all. Would simply rise to meet whatever her husband required, without complaint. The way her own mother had risen to meet every demand of her father’s household, without ever once, in Eleanor’s memory, admitting to weariness of any kind.

She did not know then that her mother’s silence had cost her a great deal more than anyone in the family had ever acknowledged aloud.

It was in London, three weeks into their marriage — returned for a fortnight for business Alexander could not postpone — that the pattern between them found its most public expression. Lady Cartwright’s ball was the first grand entertainment Eleanor had attended as a duchess, and she had taken particular care with her appearance, aware every eye in the room would be weighing whether the new Duchess of Blackthorne carried herself with sufficient grace.

She need not have worried on Alexander’s account. From the moment they entered the ballroom, his hand found the small of her back and remained there with a possessive steadiness that drew more than one curious glance.

“You are the most beautiful woman in this room,” he murmured against her temple as they waited to be announced, his breath warm enough to raise gooseflesh along her neck. “I find myself considering leaving rather earlier than fashion dictates. And we have only just arrived.”

Across the ballroom, Eleanor noticed a striking dark-haired woman in emerald silk watching their entrance with an expression that did not quite manage to disguise itself in time. She recognized the face, though they had never been introduced. Lady Constance Fairweather — whose name Eleanor had heard murmured more than once since her engagement was announced, always with the particular emphasis society reserved for a disappointed hope. It was generally understood that Lady Constance had expected the Duke’s proposal for herself.

“You are frowning,” Alexander said, following her gaze briefly before returning his attention entirely to her. “Lady Constance is no concern of yours, Duchess. Whatever my mother once hoped for that connection, I never shared the sentiment.”

“I did not say a word.”

“You did not need to. I have learned your face rather thoroughly these past weeks.”

He guided her toward the dance floor before she could pursue the subject further. They danced twice — remarkable enough to occasion whispers — and during the second, a waltz, he held her closer than etiquette permitted, near enough that the hand at her waist felt less like the correct placement for the dance and more like a deliberate, searing point of contact he had no intention of relinquishing.

“People are watching,” she whispered.

“Let them.”

They left within the hour, considerably earlier than fashion dictated, exactly as he had warned her they might. It was after nights such as these — and there were increasingly many of them — that Eleanor began to feel the first genuine strain of the pace her husband set. She loved him. She admitted the word to herself somewhere in that second week, quietly, without fanfare. But she was also increasingly exhausted, in a manner that had begun to frighten her a little, and she did not yet know how to say so without it sounding, even to her own ears, like the very rejection she feared he would hear in it.