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 4

Her lady’s maid, a quiet young woman named Susan who had come with her from her father’s house, was perhaps the only person besides Mrs. Pruitt who saw the full measure of what those weeks were costing her. It was Susan who began, without being asked, laying out looser stays in the mornings. Susan who took to brushing out Eleanor’s hair with slower, more soothing strokes than strictly necessary. Susan who once, folding away a gown, remarked quietly that a new bride was allowed her tiredness, same as any other change of circumstance, and that there was no shame in it whatsoever.

Eleanor had thanked her and said nothing more, though the kindness had very nearly undone her composure entirely.

There was an evening toward the end of their London stay when she fell asleep at her own dressing table waiting for him, her head resting against her folded arms, and woke to find him crouched beside her chair, having entered some time before and chosen, for once, simply to watch her sleep rather than wake her. His expression in the low candlelight held something she had not seen there before — not the banked heat she had grown accustomed to, but something gentler. Almost troubled.

“You are unwell,” he said quietly, when she stirred.

“Only tired.” She straightened, embarrassed to have been discovered so. “It has been a full fortnight.”

“It has.” He rose, and instead of drawing her toward the bed as she half expected, he lifted her into his arms entirely, carrying her the short distance himself despite her protest, and settled her beneath the coverlet with a care that felt, in that moment, more intimate than anything that had passed between them in the preceding weeks. He pressed a kiss to her forehead rather than her mouth. “Sleep, Eleanor,” he said, and withdrew to his own chamber without further comment.

She lay awake long after he had gone, grateful for his restraint, and yet obscurely troubled by it too — aware that she had wanted, even through her exhaustion, some small part of herself to call him back. It was a contradiction she did not yet have the language to untangle: the simultaneous genuine desire for rest, and the equally genuine fear that asking for it plainly might somehow diminish the fragile, extraordinary thing growing between them.

She did not yet understand that her silence, however well-intentioned, was building toward a reckoning neither of them could postpone indefinitely.

They returned to Blackthorne Hall a week later, and if anything, the removal from London’s watchful eyes seemed to loosen whatever remained of Alexander’s public restraint entirely. He found her in the conservatory one afternoon, ostensibly to discuss the tenant cottages, and the conversation dissolved within minutes into something else altogether, his hands framing her face as he kissed her among the potted orange trees with a thoroughness that left the cottages entirely forgotten for the remainder of the afternoon.

She loved these moments. She would have sworn to it before any court in the land. Loved the unguarded hunger in his eyes. Loved being wanted so plainly by a man who had spent thirty-six years being wanted for nothing but his title and his fortune. And yet each night now carried, alongside the very real pleasure she found in her husband’s arms, a small cold thread of dread — not dread of him, never that, but dread of her own inadequacy. Of the moment she feared was approaching, when her body would simply refuse to keep pace with a desire that seemed, by every appearance, entirely without limit.

That moment arrived on an evening that had begun, like any other, with dinner and candlelight and her husband watching her across the table with an expression she had learned to recognize instantly. Dinner passed as it always did now, with easy conversation and the particular warmth that had grown between them over these six weeks of marriage. Eleanor felt, watching him, the familiar tightening low in her stomach that his attention always produced — undiminished by exhaustion, undiminished by anything.

She loved him. That fact had settled into something certain and unshakable, no longer a discovery but simply a truth she carried through every hour of every day. It was, perhaps, precisely because the love had grown so certain that the fear beneath it had grown correspondingly larger — an anxious shadow trailing every moment of happiness, with a whispered question she could not silence. What if she was not equal to him in this, as in everything else?

She excused herself before him that evening, pleading the need to prepare for bed, and sat before her dressing table removing the pearl combs from her hair with hands that had gone, without her quite noticing, faintly unsteady. She heard the connecting door open behind her, heard the particular quiet tread of his boots she had learned to recognize instantly, and watched in the mirror as he crossed the room to stand behind her chair.

He did not speak at first. He simply gathered her hair to one side, baring the curve of her neck, and pressed his mouth to the sensitive skin just below her ear with a slow, deliberate thoroughness that sent a shiver the length of her spine despite the weariness that had settled bone-deep into every part of her that day.

“I have been thinking of you since breakfast,” he murmured against her skin, hands sliding to her shoulders, easing the light wrap from them with practiced care. “I find I think of very little else these days.”

“Alexander —”

Her voice came out smaller than she intended, and something in it must have registered, because his hands stilled briefly.

“You are tired,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“A little.”

She met his eyes in the mirror, searching for some way to say what she needed to say that would not sound like the rejection she feared he would hear in it. “It has been a very full week.”

“Then we shall make it an early night.” His mouth curved, and she understood with a sinking heart that he had entirely misread her meaning — understood it as invitation rather than the small, tentative confession she had intended. His hands resumed their slow exploration, and despite the genuine exhaustion pulling at every limb, her body responded to him the way it always did — treacherously eager, even as her mind pleaded for rest.

He turned her chair to face him, drew her up and into the circle of his arms.

“I want you five times a night,” he murmured against her temple, in the low voice that had undone her composure a hundred times these past weeks.

The words landed somewhere between the desire she always felt at his nearness and a sudden overwhelming wave of exhaustion so complete it felt almost like grief. She thought of the accounts she had not finished, of the letter to her father left half-written for three days running, of the deep, dreamless sleep she had not known in what felt like a month — and felt something in her simply give way. All at once, the careful composure she had maintained through six weeks of marriage crumbled before she could stop it.

“I can’t take it,” she said.

The words were quiet, barely more than a whisper. But they landed in the room with the force of something shattering.