Page 83 of To Steal a Duchess

How could she confess her own fear? The two of them had already danced around so much together, and she did not want to scare him away if she accidentally made their relationship sound more than it was. After all, he had warned her they were a convenient arrangement.

But Nancy’s words came back to her as a reminder that a man and woman knew the risks when they coupled. Eloise had wanted to give into him as much as he had to her, and she had been as reckless.

As she walked into the empty dining hall, she imagined her parents sitting at a cold, long table in Wittby House, barely speaking. Eloise sat between them, wondering why her parents did not seem to love each other as couples did in books she read.

Why they did not look like other couples who linked arms while walking down the street, and wondering why their cold marriage made Eloise feel so alone.

For a moment, it was Dorian and herself in their places in her mind, and a child with sad eyes looking between them before Dorian left for business, and Eloise did her best to raise her child far better than her mother had raised her.

She was terrified.

She turned her back on the dining hall, slipping outside as she heard heavy footsteps coming down the main stairs. She could not bear to look at Dorian—could not bear to raise a child in a marriage she had no idea what it was.

No, she could not face him. Not when, as she stepped outside and away from the empty hall, she could see a different, warmer future with him and their child.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Several days passed, and Eloise could barely look out at the lighthouse from the windows. She walked Pickle, but made sure to face the opposite way, keeping her back to the very room that Dorian had first made love to her in.

The room he had kept locked but opened up to her—only to now shut her out at such a pivotal moment.

She was walking in the tall grasses ahead of the shore beyond Oldcliff Hall when a terrible cramp built sharply in her lower abdomen. Eloise gasped out, recognizing the pain, and fell to her knees. Pickle barked, rushing to her side, but she held up a comforting hand.

“It is fine,” she groaned, pressing a hand to her stomach. “It is fine, Pickle. Do not worry.”

But she looked down, finding specks of blood beneath her, and she froze.

Her cycle.

It had actually come.

The usual cramping sensation worked through her as she stood up.

Eloise turned on her heel, and she found herself gazing at Dorian.

“Eloise, are you all right?” he asked.

“It seems my cycle, though delayed, has arrived.” Her voice was quiet in the wind that whipped around the cove. “It means… it means I am not with child.”

“But you are in pain,” he said, not acknowledging the potential of what had almost happened, but Eloise set her jaw and jabbed a finger in his chest.

“I am in normal pain. And perhaps the illness was merely an on-set of my cycle, or—or I do not know, but I am tired of you distancing yourself from me once again, forcing me to do the same. This… this situation has scared us both, but we cannot keep ignoring it. I am tired of ignoring things, Dorian. I am tired of ignoring you, or pushing down my thoughts because I feel as though I am putting them onto you. Are you not exhausted of us being back in this distant place with one another?”

He only looked back at her, swallowing hard.

“Speak to me,” she demanded. “Because I will not waste another moment with your silence. We both went through that possibility of having a child, and we both deserve to speak our minds about it. About why we have not been able to look one another in the eye ever since. I want to speak to you, no matter how hard it can be. Do you wish to speak to me?”

“Do you think I do not?”

“I am asking you. You like control, so I am giving you the option.”

Something hard crossed Dorian’s face, and she saw it: the repression of his surprise that she was giving him this back.

She stepped closer. “I might be bleeding, Dorian, and I might be in pain, but I am your wife, and I will not go anywhere until you give me an answer.”

“Of course I wish to speak to you,” he snapped. The crashing current beyond them seemed to swallow his words and echo them back. “But I am uncertain I can. I do not know if the words will come. I—I look at you, Eloise, and I see all of what I almost put upon you when I promised you, at the start⁠—”

“I have autonomy, Dorian,” she whispered, reaching out to cup his face. “I have choices I have made, and I knew the one we made together. We were perhaps unthinking of any consequences, but I knew, in those moments, I wanted you more than I have ever wanted anything.” She moved back, ensuring Pickle was still at her ankles. “Now, I will leave for the mansion to clean up and get myself prepared. Have a glass of wine with me in the parlor. No dinner, no pressure of something bigger. Just you and I, speaking. I will wait for you.”