Page 47 of To Steal a Duchess

A frustrated growl left him as he gripped the writing desk in his room.

He wanted to swipe everything off it.

All he could see when he closed his eyes was the sheer wonder on her face as she had circled around that room in the lighthouse, and he had wanted to ask: how dare something so awful to him could be so beautiful to her.

How could she look upon something and look as she had, when all Dorian had seen was pain?

Because she does not know where you come from, nor what happened in that lighthouse.

Dorian hated himself.

Control kept him composed. It kept him sane. It kept him right where he needed to be as both a duke who had fought for his title and what it meant, as well as a man. But now, beyond simply wondering about how Eloise affected him, he knew that his wife had altered him too much.

She had somehow slipped beneath the boundaries of his control, and she was undoing him, even without realizing, perhaps.

A knock on his door had him spinning sharply. “Yes?” The bite in his voice was evident even to him.

“Your Grace.” The voice of his valet came through the closed door.

“Enter.”

His valet did. He bowed upon entry. “Her Grace is requesting your presence as dinner tonight. Will you be attend⁠—”

“Tell Her Grace I am busy. In fact, tell her I have gone out of the village.”

Dorian felt as though he had said too much, and even that realization made him think he was spiraling too much out of control, and that further sent him into a frenzy. He was glad to see his valet hastily depart his chambers so Dorian could shut the door harshly behind him.

He could not grasp himself nor control himself, and if he could not do that, how could he hope to have control over anything else?

What have you done to me, Eloise?

He was already unraveling too much, both physically and mentally.

He could not stop it, and he knew the only way was to reinstate the distance between them.

No more dinners; no more guests; no more⁠—

No more letting myself taste her, he thought, thinking of the sweetness of sugar on Eloise’s tongue, for he had seen the sugar she heaped into her morning tea.

No more. There could be no more.

Since the…incident in the lighthouse, Eloise had spent her time ghosting through Oldcliff Hall. Attempting to distract herself, she kept taking Pickle out on a leash along the beach and the cliff paths, but nothing could truly take her mind off the burning kiss in the lighthouse room.

She couldn’t fathom what had happened.

And why had Dorian looked so terrified to see her trip in that room? What had worried him so much?

She could still feel his fingers grasping her upper arms as though he was scared to let go, as though she was his tether, but she knew that was impossible. Men like him did not anchor themselves to convenient wives like Eloise. They took convenient wives precisely because their lives were anchored elsewhere.

So what had even happened up there, except for Eloise letting down her defenses for a husband who had retracted at the first sound of something interrupting them?

Her heart sank as she thought over it once again, as she had been for the past two days.

She was tired of hurting, of questioning, so she still tried to focus on Pickle’s paws pounding the sand, and she smiled as she saw how strong he was becoming. He was no longer the abandoned pup hunkering down in the bushes in the woods.

He was hers.

That much, at least, was reliable.