Page 93 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“My father was not what the world believed him to be. She showed me then…” He stopped, then made himself go on. “She showed me what he had done to her, over years. Things a coat sleeve or a high collar can hide if a woman is careful.” He looked down. “My mother had become very careful.”

“I cannot imagine… how hard this was…”

“He had never touched me. I used to think that was mercy. It wasn’t. I was his heir and I was useful to him, and a man like my father did not break the things he had use for. But Rachel was a small girl. He’d have had no use for her at all, only contempt, and my mother knew exactly what that contempt would grow into.”

“Oh Frederick…”

“She thought… God help her, she thought the kindest thing she could do for that child was end it before it began. But I told her I would not let that happen. I swore I would protect her, and I would protect Rachel. So, I became the wall between them and him. I learned what drew his eye and what turned it away. Sometimes I would stand in the wrong place at the right moment just so his temper landed somewhere it could do less damage. For a long time, it worked.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then he understood what I was doing. After that, Anna, it was me.”

He said it, without looking away, and watched tears come slowly into Anna’s eyes, and did not stop.

“And when I looked at you and I knew more than most just what you had walked out of on your wedding morning. I was not looking at a woman in difficulty. I was looking at something I had failed once before, something I had promised myself I would not fail again.” He paused. “That is what I told myself. At first.”

“And after?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

“After,” he said, “I stopped being able to distinguish between protecting you and wanting you close to me. And I could not tell you that. I told myself I could not tell you that, because I have myfather’s cursed blood in me, and I had watched what that blood did to the people in its reach. I thought that it was better for this line to end with me.”

He said it as plainly as everything else and watched her face. He waited for her to speak.

“Do you still believe that?” she asked.

He was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said. “Not anymore. Not for some time if I am being honest, which I intend to be henceforth.” He looked at her. “When I think of the future now, and oh God, I have tried not to, for a considerable while… but when I do, it is not absence I see. Every argument I made for restraint has stopped making sense.”

“What do you see now?” she asked. “When you think of the future?”

“You,” he said simply, quickly, his voice warm and full. “I see you. And I want…” He stopped, steadied himself. “I want it all, Anna. Not in pieces. Not at a careful distance. A life. A home. Children, if God is good and now more than ever I pray that he is. Everything you told me you wanted in the middle of a market, and everything you didn’t say.” His voice was even, but underneath it she would be able to hear, he hoped, the thing that evenness was costing him. “I know I have no right to ask it. I know what I put you through in this Season and the year before, the distance, the withdrawal. It seemed cruel, but I hope you understand now…”

“Tell me now then.”

“I know I kissed you in a carriage and then apologized for it as though it were a fault to be corrected, and I am so very sorry for that. For all of it.” He held her gaze. “I love you.”

She did not speak immediately. She was too busy looking at him, really looking, the way she had not quite let herself do until now as he laid himself bare before her. At his face, drawn thin with exhaustion born from care. At his hands, which had not stopped moving since he began, restless in a way she had never seen from him, as though the stillness he wore like armor had finally cracked. She could not reckon that Frederick, the Duke of Rathbourne, was now sitting folded into a sickroom chair too small for a man his size, having not slept in a day, telling her the worst thing he knew about himself.

He has never told this to a living soul. Not like this.

She understood, watching him, that she was not only hearing the words. She was hearing everything that had stood behind him for years. She saw the boy who had learned to read a room before he could properly read a treatise, the man who had built himself around the shape of a wound he’d never shown anyone.

He is telling me this, with all his heart, because he trusts that I will not break it.

“I believe you,” she said at last. “Not only the words. All of it. Thank you for sharing this with me.”

She watched something in him ease at that, just slightly at the shoulders.

“But I have to say this.” She drew a breath, aware of how thin her own voice sounded. “I do not want to be something you protect from a distance. I have been protected from a distance before. It is lonely in a way that is worse than being unprotected. Do you understand that? To be kept safe by someone who has already decided not to need you back.” She held his eyes, because this part mattered too much to look away from.

“I think I do.”

“If I am to be with you, it must be because you want me. Not because you feel responsible for my pain, or because you are some hero. Not because Birchall reminded you of something you couldn’t leave behind.”

“I swear it is not that,” he said immediately, before she had even finished drawing breath after the last word. “It has never been only that. If it were, I would have been able to walk away.”

She studied him. Some old, careful part of her that had learned, long before him, to distrust a man’s certainty, made her ask it anyway. “Are you certain you are not simply confusing care for love?”

“I know the difference,” he said. “I swear it. Care is what I have given everyone, my entire life. It is organized. Manageable. It does not…” He stopped. “What I feel for you has not made me more controlled. It has made me considerably less. That is how I know.”