Page 52 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
This was the last meeting, Edward had told him that morning. No more. He was going back to Thornhill tonight, and if George had something left to say, he could say it now.
Edward found them in a private room on the second floor. George sat in a wingback chair with a glass of brandy, one ankle crossed over his knee, looking like he had been there for hours and planned to stay for several more.
He had not changed. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Mustache trimmed with the precision of a man who cared more about appearances than most people cared about anything. He was handsome in the way a well-made knife was handsome. One admired it, but one did not forget what it was for.
Peter stood by the window. He was shorter than George. Broader. Fair hair going grey at the temples, though he was barely thirty-five. He had a nervous energy that Edward had always found useful in the field and irritating everywhere else. He checked exits and counted heads the way other men breathed.
He was drumming his fingers on the windowsill when Edward walked in. He stopped when he saw him.
“There he is,” George drawled, not standing. He raised his glass. “The Duke of Welford. I will never tire of saying that.”
“You might attempt to stop saying it. Just to see what happens,” Edward said. He pulled a chair from the corner and sat. Did not grab a drink to keep a clear head.
Old habits.
The room was smaller than the ones he was used to. Two windows. One door. Exit through the corridor and down the servants’ staircase at the back, if it came to that.
It would not come to that. These were his friends. His oldest friends. The only people alive who knew his real name, his history, and the things he had done in rooms much smaller than this one.
He had not seen them in three months. Not since he had left the Crown’s service. Not since the day he had walked into the Queen’s private chambers and laid his pistol on her desk and said, “I’m done.”
She had looked at him for a long time. Then she had nodded. “I expected you sooner,” she had said.
That was all. No ceremony. No farewell. Twelve years of service, and the end of it took less time than ordering a meal.
Since then, he had been at Thornhill, learning to be a duke. Learning to eat breakfast at a table instead of standing by a window. Learning to sleep in a bed instead of a chair. Learning,slowly and with considerable difficulty, to be a person rather than a tool.
Breakfast was the hardest part. Sitting still. Letting food come to him instead of eating whatever was available and moving on.
Valeria had noticed. She noticed everything. She noticed that he stood by exits, that he did not drink, and that he flinched at loud sounds. She noticed, yet she did not comment. And the grace of her silence was the most generous thing anyone had ever given him.
“You look well,” Peter noted. “Rested. Almost civilized.”
“Almost,” Edward agreed.
“Marriage agrees with you already,” George said. “Or is it the prospect of marriage? I hear she is beautiful, the Duchess of Thornhill.” He rolled the title in his mouth like wine. “A widow. Very young. Very rich. Very alone.”
Something shifted in Edward’s chest. A tightening.
George had a talent for finding the softest part of a subject and pressing on it.
Valeria was alone. She had been alone in a house with a dead man’s debts and the memory of three years that nobody outside those walls understood. The thought of her sitting in that study at night, quill in hand, planning orphanages and schools, withnobody beside her except a maid who washed her secrets with the household linens, made his fists clench under the table.
He had left her. That was the part that gnawed at him. He had kissed her in the drawing room, touched her on the carpet, heard the sounds she made, felt her fingers in his hair, and yet he had left. Because George sent a message. Because his old life called and old habits answered, and he was out the door before he could think about what he was leaving behind.
He was always leaving things behind. It was what he was good at. Cities and countries and safe houses and people. One did not form attachments while in service. Attachments were liabilities. Attachments got you killed, or worse, got the people you loved killed.
He had learned that lesson early and well, and he had carried it for twelve years like a stone in his chest. And now, a woman with auburn hair and brave eyes was trying to teach him that the lesson was wrong.
He was not sure he could unlearn it. But he was starting to want to.
“She is not alone,” he corrected. “She has family. And she will have me.”
“How romantic.” George’s smile did not reach his eyes. It never did.
Edward had known him for twelve years, and he had never once seen George smile with anything other than his mouth. His eyes stayed flat. Watchful. Calculating the cost of every word before he spent it.
“And the auction? Did you win, or did you simply terrify everyone else into leaving?”
