Page 59 of A Duke to Reclaim Her
He did not answer, not at once. He flexed his hands, as if wringing water from them. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s— I can’t?—”
Rose waited, afraid to interrupt. She watched his face, saw the memories working behind his eyes, and realized he was not in this room at all.
“My mother loved my father,” he said. “She loved him until it ruined her. He did not return it, not the way she deserved. She spent her whole life believing it was a test of her virtue. She waited for him to change, and every time he hurt her, she thought she could be good enough to fix it.”
Rose listened, her own heart pounding.
Felix went on, voice tight. “He betrayed her, again and again. In every way that counted. And when she died, she died empty, Rose. Empty and alone. All the love she poured into him just… vanished.”
Rose reached for his shoulder, but he flinched imperceptibly. She let her hand drop.
“You are not him,” she said, though she was not entirely sure.
“I could be,” Felix said, with a bitter little laugh. “I could be exactly him if you let me. I don’t want that for you. Not ever.”
She bit her lip, trying to swallow the pain. “I am not your mother. And you are not your father.”
He looked at her, eyes bleak. “Aren’t I? I thought if I made myself hard enough, cold enough, I would never have to find out.”
He turned on his side, away from her. His body formed a barrier on the bed, as absolute as any wall.
Rose lay there, stunned.
She had done this. She had destroyed the only peace she had ever known, with three foolish words.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but the apology fell between them, untouched.
She stared at his back, at the broad line of his shoulders, and felt a grief so old it had no name. She wanted to shake him, to force him to see her, but she was too afraid that he already did.
The night crawled by. The fire died down to a whisper. She could not sleep, not with the ache in her chest, not with the memory of his withdrawal. At last, when the windows grew silver with pre-dawn, she heard his breathing change, felt the tension ebb.
She rolled to her own edge of the bed, wrapping herself in the blanket, and waited for Felix to say anything. To explain, to apologize, to recant.
He said nothing at all.
Rose lay awake, watching the light crawl up the wall, and wondered what it meant to love someone who could never love her back. She had survived worse, she reminded herself. She would survive again.
But it felt, in that moment, like all the warmth in the world had gone out.
CHAPTER 19
Felix Greycliff had always regarded the passage of time as a solvent, a means to wash away the corrosion of human folly and leave only the hard, immutable dross beneath. He put his faith in routine, in the circular nature of duty and discipline, and most of all in the knowledge that every agony could be diluted, if not erased, by the patient application of hours, days, or years.
That certainty had abandoned him now.
In the weeks since Rose’s confession, the days at Grosvenor Square bled one into the next, colorless and interchangeable. Felix found he could not remember the weather, or the meals, or the news from the house, except as a series of tiny offenses: a soup too tepid, a pair of gloves misplaced, the scandal of a friend seen in the wrong company.
Every error was a hairline crack, a flaw that would not heal. He haunted the house as a silent observer, slipping from study tolibrary to smoking room and back, always with a glass in hand, never with a thought that could bear too close an examination.
He did not speak to Rose, and he certainly did not look at her. He maneuvered his hours with military precision, ensuring that his path never intersected hers. The one time they crossed in the corridor outside the nursery, he had been forced to invent a sudden urgency about the estate ledgers. He saw her flinch, and hated himself for it, but not enough to stop.
The nursery, once a bright and almost comic theater of domestic chaos, was now strictly out of bounds. Felix could not abide the sound of Lizzie’s babbling voice, which had become uncannily like Rose’s—soft, fluting, full of questions she could not yet put into words.
If Rose was in the nursery, he was in the stables, and if she walked in the garden, he found a reason to ride into the city. He took to exercising his horse at dawn, before even the scullery maids had begun their scurrying, and for an hour or two, the ache in his chest was at least matched by the ache in his muscles. Most days, he did not bother to change from his riding clothes after, preferring to sit in his battered coat alone.
He was dimly aware that the staff talked about it below stairs, but they had learned to keep their remarks contained and their eyes averted when he passed.
It was in this state, disheveled and hollow-eyed, that David found him.
