Page 70 of The Duke's Promise to Her Child
But she could not find the words. Not yet. Not with Emmett’s cruelty still sitting in the room and her own hands shaking inside the cage of her arms.
What she could feel was the warmth they had built over these last weeks — the breakfast table, the daisy chains, the market, the moment in the portrait gallery before Heathcliff’s footsteps had interrupted them — draining away. And what was left in its place was a cold and familiar emptiness that frightened her far more than Emmett Graham ever could.
Because she knew now what she stood to lose. And that knowledge was almost worse than not having known it at all.
CHAPTER 30
GIDEON
He knew the moment he looked at her that whatever progress they had made over the last few days had been wiped away — and that it was his doing that had wiped it. It was written all across her face. That quiet panic that overcame her whenever he raised his voice, that instinctive flinching. He had tried to defend her, and it had come to this.
“Helena,” he started. But she raised a hand.
“I cannot,” she said simply, and walked away.
He went into his study and sat in his chair with his head in his hands. It did not matter how much progress they made. Every time he thought something had shifted between them, something came along to undo it. The afternoon at the market had felt like a glimpse of the life he had always imagined — the two of them, and Lavinia, and something real and warm between them. That was exactly what he had hoped for. And now here it was in pieces.
He got up after a while and looked out of the window. Helena was outside, walking with Mary at her side. Mary had one hand at the small of her back. Helena was crying.
He turned away. He could not sit here. He had his horse saddled and rode out without direction, following the lane until the fields opened and he could put the animal into a proper pace. He rode until the church at Haslington rose up ahead of him through the trees and he pulled up without quite knowing why.
He was not a religious man. He never had been. But he tied his horse to the gate and went in.
The vicar was in the rectory. He looked up when Gideon appeared in the doorway and said, without any particular surprise, “Your Grace. Please come in. How can I help you?”
“I do not know that you can,” Gideon said. “I am at something of a point of crisis.”
“That I do not like the sound of at all. Sit down and tell me.”
Gideon sat, and told him the whole of it. From the beginning — Captain Hartwell, the promise, the years he had failed to keep it. Helena’s circumstances in Bloomsbury. Everything that had followed. The marriage. The weeks at Blackthorne. The slow and careful progress that seemed to collapse every time he did something without knowing what he had done wrong.
When he finished he let out a long breath and pressed his hands against his face. “I was foolish enough to believe that by now our marriage would be more than it is. That she would feel for me as I feel for her. But no matter what I do she is afraid of me, and I cannot understand it. She was not like this when we first met.”
The vicar took a slow drink of small ale and set it down. “It sounds to me, Your Grace, as though the way she responds to you changed when you married. When you were simply a friend, you had no power over her circumstances. Once you became her husband, you became the man who holds authority over every part of her life. And if her previous husband was prone to anger…”
“He was,” Gideon said. “I do not know the details but it has been indicated to me.”
“Then she has learned, through long experience, to associate that position with what came after his anger. She knows you are different. But knowing it and feeling it are not the same thing. Not yet.”
Gideon rubbed his forehead. “I have tried to speak to her about it. She will not tell me what happened to her.”
“Then do not ask. Sit with her quietly. Let her see, through ordinary and repeated evidence, that you are not the pattern she has come to expect. That is all you can do.”
Gideon was quiet for a moment. “Do you know what the most bitter part of this is? Yesterday she asked to take breakfast withme. Of her own accord. We went to town together. We had the most — it was exactly how I had imagined things could be between us. And now this.”
“Do you love her?” the vicar asked.
He pressed his lips together. He knew the answer. He had known it for some time. He had simply never said it aloud.
“Yes,” he said. “I love her. Her strength. Her determination. The way she walked into a room full of strangers and settled a dispute in ten minutes flat.”
“Then tell her so,” the vicar said. “Not as a demand. Simply so she knows it.” He paused, and something shifted in his expression toward the dry. “And on a rather less weighty matter — I must tell you, Your Grace, that the apple pie won by a considerable margin. It is simply not godly to insult a man’s taste in pastries when he is already feeling out of sorts.”
“It is a dry and contrary fruit,” Gideon said. “I stand by the rhubarb.”
They shook hands, and Gideon made his way back to his horse.
The ride home felt longer than the ride out. With every mile his stomach tightened. What mood would he find her in? What would she say when she saw him? What, if anything, was left to say at all?
