Page 59 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“I expect,” he said slowly. “… that we will find our footing. That we will be respectful of each other. That we will manage this household and care for Frederick and the staff. That we conduct ourselves in a manner that serves us both.” He paused. “I do not expect anything from you, Emily. You do not owe me anything.”
Emily took a steadying breath, pulling her dignity around her like a cloak. “I see.”
She felt a sudden, sharp need to be away from him, the weight of the morning becoming far too much to bear. “If you will excuse me, Your Grace. I find I am a little overwhelmed in this moment. I must check on the kitchen's progress for Frederick’s breakfast.”
She didn't wait for his response. She turned and walked down the long corridor, her footsteps silent, leaving him standing alone in the gray light of the dawn.
“Are you perhaps upset with me?”
Emily looked up from the rose she had been examining with considerably more attention than it required. Theodore was standing at the garden gate with his coat off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
The gardens at Carrowell had become Emily’s sanctuary, a place where the air felt less heavy than it did within the silent, vaulted corridors of the house. Frederick was finally on the mend, his fever a memory thanks to the physician Theodore had summoned. Emily knew she should be grateful, but the words felt like ash in her mouth.
She looked back at the rose. “No, Your Grace.”
“You have taken a liking to the rose garden,” he said.
“I like this garden.”
“You have also,” he said, coming through the gate. “Declined to take tea in the house two times since Tuesday and sent your apologies for dinner twice.”
“I have been busy.”
“In the garden?”
“Gardens require attention,” Emily said. “Mr. Briggs told me so at some length.”
Theodore came to stand beside her. Not too close. The careful, considered distance he had been maintaining since the corridor outside Frederick's room, which she had noticed and told herself she had not noticed.
“I am trying to mend things,” he said calmly. “To apologize for the dinners I missed. Don’t tell me this is retaliation.”
She looked at the rose.
She had been telling herself a great many things lately that were not entirely true.
She had been telling herself, for instance, that she was not bothered by any of it. By the honeymoon that had not felt like one. By the days that passed with Theodore somewhere in the house and her somewhere else in it, two people orbiting the same space without quite occupying it together. She had gotten what she came to this marriage for. Frederick was safe. The physician Theodore had sent for was considerably better than the village doctor, and Frederick was well again, surprisingly running through the corridors with the maid and laughing. Something he did not do a lot of back in her father’s house.
She could not complain.
She was not complaining.
She was standing in a rose garden at eleven in the morning because she could not sit still. She could not concentrate, andshe had a maddening, persistent curiosity about the man she had married with no reasonable outlet that was making her thoroughly unsettled.
She had heard about his mother. She had heard it from Peggy, and she had been turning it over ever since, quietly and without telling anyone she was doing it. A boy in a cold house. A father who made perfection the price of approval. A mother who left. She wanted to know what that had been like. She wanted to know what he had been like at ten years old and at fifteen and at twenty, and what had made him decide to be the loudest person in every room he walked into when warmth was apparently the last thing his childhood had offered him.
She wanted to know him, and the thought was maddening.
That was the plain, inconvenient truth of it. She was curious about Theodore Merrick in a way she had never been about anyone in her life, and he was right there, in this house, every day, and she had no idea how to say any of that without it causing problems.
He had made it clear that they were only to be cordial.
Cordial.She clenched her jaw.
“Emily,” he called her gently.
She looked up instinctively.
He had formed a habit of calling her like that whenever he wanted her to bend to his will, and it worked. She just realized in that moment that it worked.
