“I Never Should Have Married You,” the Duke Told His Steward — But When His Wife Smiled and Replied, “Good News, You No Longer Have To,” He Had Only Five Weeks to Stop Her Leaving and Confess the Love He Had Hidden for Nearly a Year

PART 6

They spent the rest of the short winter afternoon packing a single crate of her father’s notebooks to carry back to Fossborough. Not all of it, not yet, but a beginning. Chosen with careful deliberation from among the shelves. Odelina narrated the significance of each volume with a warmth Ketrick had not seen in her before — not even in her sharpest, wittiest triumphs over Lady Penrith or Margarite Selwin. It was, he understood, watching her, a different kind of courage than the one she showed the drawing room. Quieter. More costly. The courage of letting herself be glad of something without first bracing to have it taken away.

On the ride home, with the crate secured behind them and the winter light fading fast toward an early dusk, she fell asleep against his shoulder somewhere past the second milestone. Worn out by grief and gladness in equal measure. Ketrick sat very still through the rest of the journey, unwilling to wake her, watching the frost-seeded hedgerows slip past the window, and thinking, with a clarity that startled him, that he had gone to Alcott Grange that morning meaning only to settle a matter of mortgage papers. And had come home instead having settled something considerably larger and harder to name. The last of his own careful distance, dismantled entirely in the dusty, book-crowded study of a man he had met only once, briefly, as a boy shown a moth’s wing under glass.

He found her in the stables at dawn three mornings later — which surprised him less than it ought to have, given how little of Fossborough had surprised him about her lately.

Ketrick had never slept well, a habit inherited, like most of his habits, from a father who considered rest a luxury for men without responsibilities. He had taken since boyhood to riding out before the house woke, when the mist still lay low over the park and the only sounds were his horse’s breath and his own thoughts. He came round the corner of the stable yard, expecting Corvvis already saddled and the groom half asleep, and found instead his wife in a plain riding habit, her hair loosely plaited rather than pinned, coaxing a bridle over the head of the grey mare with a low, coaxing murmur that had nothing of the duchess in it at all.

“You keep early hours, Your Grace,” she said without turning, though she must have heard his step on the cobbles.

“So, apparently, do you.”

“I sleep badly in this house. I have since I arrived. There is a particular quality to the silence at Fossborough that I have never quite made my peace with. As though the walls are listening and disapprove of what they hear.”

She finished with the bridle and turned to face him. There was color already in her cheeks from the cold morning air, and something unguarded in her expression that the drawing room never permitted her to wear.

“I did not think dukes rode before their valets were awake to dress them for it.”

“This duke has been dressing himself since he was nine years old, and my father decided that a valet’s attention bred softness.” He nodded at the mare. “Ren, is it? You have named your husband’s horses without consulting him.”

“She was nameless when I found her three months ago, eating her own hay net out of boredom in the far stall, while your grooms fussed over Corvvis and forgot she existed. Every creature deserves a name, Your Grace. Even the ones nobody thought to give one.”

She swung up into the saddle with an ease that told him this was not the first such dawn, nor likely the fiftieth.

“I did not ask your leave because I did not imagine you would notice or care. I see now I ought to have asked regardless. Forgive the presumption.”

“I did not say I minded.”

“No,” she agreed, gathering the reins. “You rarely do say, Your Grace. It is one of your more maddening qualities. A man ought to say when he minds a thing and say when he does not, rather than leaving a woman to guess at the whole of him from the set of his jaw.”

He had no answer for that. None that would not require admitting more than he was prepared to admit, standing in a cold stable yard at five in the morning. So instead he mounted Corvvis and said only: “There is a track along the river that outpaces anything you have found on your own. If you can keep your seat past the mill, I will show it to you.”

“If I can keep my seat?” She repeated with an arch of her brow that he was learning to dread and anticipate in equal measure. “Your Grace, I learned to ride before I learned to properly curtsy — on a pony my father could not afford and loved regardless. I believe I shall manage.”

She did rather more than manage. She rode hard and well, and without the studied carefulness of a woman performing horsemanship for an audience. By the time they reached the river track and the horses ran — truly ran — along the flat stretch beneath the old oaks, Ketrick found himself laughing. A real laugh, startled out of him, when Ren’s shorter stride somehow overtook Corvvis on the final rise, and Odelina threw a triumphant look back over her shoulder that held nothing of a duchess in it — and everything of the girl she must once have been, tearing across her father’s meager fields on a borrowed pony with the whole of the future still unwritten before her.

“You cheated,” he said when he caught her up at the crest, both horses blowing, both riders flushed with more than the cold.

“I did no such thing. Ren is simply the superior animal, and you have been too proud to admit it because Corvvis cost you three times what she did.” She was breathless and laughing and utterly unguarded. “Admit it, Your Grace — you are unaccustomed to losing.”

“I am unaccustomed to a great many things lately,” he said before he could stop himself. And watched her laughter still into something quieter, something that made the morning feel suddenly very close and very warm, despite the mist still clinging to the low ground.

They walked the horses back at an easier pace. Somewhere along the river track, her glove came loose at the wrist — a small, ordinary mishap, the leather having worked itself undone in the ride. She stopped to refasten it and fumbled with cold, stiffened fingers. And he found himself dismounting without quite deciding to, crossing to her, taking her hand in his to do up the small buttons himself.

It should have been nothing. It was, in the strict accounting of propriety, nothing at all. A husband assisting his wife with a glove, the sort of small courtesy any gentleman might offer. But her hand was cold in his, and very still. And when he glanced up from the buttons, he found her watching him with an expression he had never seen on her before. Something unguarded, searching, and faintly afraid. As though she too understood that they had wandered somewhere neither of them had quite intended to go, and did not know whether to be glad of it or to run.

He did not run. Neither did she.

For a long moment, there was only the sound of the river and the horses cropping at the frosted grass, and his thumb resting forgotten against the pulse in her wrist. And the peculiar sensation of a man who has spent thirty-four years believing himself entirely master of his own feelings, discovering all at once that he was not master of this one at all.