Page 74 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
"The eastern routes,” he answered almost too quickly. “There have been disputes about the tariff arrangements."
"I see," she said. "Surely your solicitors could handle the bulk of the paperwork? Or is the London air suddenly more conducive to business than the study you’ve spent every waking hour in for weeks now?"
She was poking at the edges of his story, desperate to find a seam she could pull until the whole facade unraveled. She wantedhim to admit he was fleeing. She wanted him to say he was uncomfortable, or angry, or even confused, anything other than the chilling indifference.
Emily watched him, her heart doing a strange, frantic dance in her chest. Something had shifted in the tectonic plates of their arrangement. The sharp, annoying friction that had defined their early days, the constant, sparking battle of wits she had grown to rely on had melted into a heavy, suffocating heat. She tried to tell herself that the ache she felt watching him prepare to leave was merely a sense of debt. He had saved Frederick; he had given her a sanctuary. Naturally, she was simply concerned for the stability of her benefactor.
"Is it truly the business?" she pressed, her voice softening, losing its defensive edge. "Or is it that you find the company here... changed?"
She wanted him to admit that he felt it too... the terrifying gravity pulling them toward a center they hadn't agreed upon. She wanted him to say that the library had changed everything.
"The company is as it has always been," he replied, though the slight tremor in his hand as he set down his cup betrayed him.
Emily looked away, the guilt redoubling. She had let her guard down, and in doing so, she had made the air between them impossible to breathe. She was indebted to him for her life, her name, and her nephew's future, and yet she had repaid him by making his own home a place he felt the need to flee. If she wasn't careful, the understanding they had built would benothing more than a ghost, and she would be left haunting the halls of a house that felt far too large without his presence to fill it.
“Theodore,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “Do you think... perhaps we need to talk?”
Theodore didn't even look up from his coffee. He adjusted the set of his cuffs slowly and let out a soft sigh. “About what specifically?”
“About —” She stopped, the word catching in the back of her throat like a physical obstacle. She tried again, her voice smaller this time. “About things. Between us. About whether things are —” She pressed her lips together, searching for a word that didn't sound like an accusation. “About whether things are all right.”
“Things are all right,” he said, his tone flat and unyielding.
“Are they?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him, truly looked at him. “You do not seem like someone for whom things are all right.”
“I seem perfectly fine,” he said, his voice dropping. “I have business in London,” he repeated, his gaze fixed on a point just past her shoulder.
“You have business here too,” she said, her hands clenching at her sides. “You have an estate and a ward that really likes you and a —” She stopped, the wordwifehovering in the air between them.
“A what?” he asked, his eyes finally snapping to hers, challenging her to finish the sentence.
She met his gaze, her breath hitching. “A household,” she said, retreating to the safer, colder word. “You have a household.”
She felt something rise in her then, a sudden, hot tide that was not quite frustration and not quite distress, but a volatile mixture of both, stirred together with a sharp longing. “Theodore,” she said, almost in a whisper. “What is the matter with you?”
“Nothing is the matter with me.”
“Something is the matter with you.”
“Emily —”
“You have been strange for days now,” she said, the words spilling out now, no longer contained by her pride. “You have been perfectly pleasant and perfectly present and completely unreachable, and I do not know what I am supposed to do with that.”
She was keeping her voice level. She was doing an admirable job of keeping her voice level, even as the room seemed to shrink around them.
“You said we would talk. You said that on the stairs, and you said it in the garden, and you have been saying it and then finding reasons not to —”
She stopped abruptly. The echo of her own voice felt too loud, too desperate in the quiet of the morning room. A sudden, cold wave of self-consciousness washed over her, and she retreated mentally, pulling her thoughts back behind the barricades she had spent years building.
He was saying too much. She was acting like a woman who had a claim on his time, his thoughts, and his presence, when their contract had promised nothing of the sort.
The fear that she was becoming a burden—or worse, a woman asking for more than he was willing to give—tightened her throat. She didn't want to be the reason he felt suffocated in his own home. If he was going to London to find air, she wouldn't be the one to snatch it from him.
She smoothed the front of her gown, her expression shifting from heated frustration to a brittle, polite mask.
