Page 65 of Caught By the Ruthless Duke
Here was a woman she had liked—had been genuinely glad to find, in those early bewildering weeks at Ashmere, as a source of warmth and clear-sightedness and frank amusement. Here was a woman who had drawn her out at dinner, who had told her things about Theodore that had proved more accurate than any other intelligence she possessed, who had laughed with genuine delight and looked at her with the particular regard of someone who saw a person and approved of what they saw.
And this same woman had looked at the circumstances of her life—her parents’ plans, her engagement to Emerton, the vulnerability of her position—and had made a decision.
Not with her, butforher. With kindness, but without consultation. As though the question of what Cressida Whitaker’s future should contain was a matter that could reasonably be settled by someone else, provided that person had good intentions and sufficient connections.
Cressida had spent two years at her aunt’s house being managed by people who believed they knew what was best for her. She had scrubbed floors and mended gowns and slept in an attic and been grateful, she was told, for the opportunity to do so. She was familiar with the texture of being decided upon by those who meant well.
It was peculiar how generosity and presumption could arrive in identical dress.
“You wanted to save us,” she said slowly.
“Yes.” Lady Seymore’s voice was softer now. “I know how that sounds. I know it was not?—”
“Not your decision.” Cressida said it without heat, because heat would have been the easy response, and this did not feel like a moment for easy responses. “It was not your decision, My Lady. I understand that you meant well. I believe that entirely and without reservation. But you treated my life as a difficulty to be resolved on my behalf, without once asking whether I wished itresolved, or how, or at what cost to me.” She met Lady Seymore’s eyes. “I was not a piece to be moved into position.”
Lady Seymore received that with the quiet of a woman who had no defense to raise and knew it. “I know,” she said steadily. “I am sorry, Cressida.”
Theodore had not said anything, so Cressida looked at him.
He was standing with his back half to the table, one hand resting on the dark mahogany, and he was looking at Lady Seymore with an expression Cressida had not seen from him before. This was something older and harder.
“You interfered,” he said. “In my home, in my marriage decisions, without saying a single word to me.”
“I did.” Lady Seymore’s voice did not waver. “I believed it was the only way to bring you together. That without a formal obligation, without a circumstance requiring your hand, you would have found reason after reason to keep your distance from any happiness you might have had.”
“You—” He stopped and gathered himself. “Do not explain your reasoning to me again. I have heard it.”
“Theodore, I only—” Lady Seymore tried, but he held up his hand, cutting her words short.
“I don’t need saving.” He said it far more quietly than anything else he had said that evening, and it was precisely because of that restraint that it arrived with the force it did. There was nothing theatrical in it, nothing that invited argument or appeal. “I did not need it then. I do not need it now. Not from you… or anyone else.”
Lady Seymore looked at him for a long moment. “I did it for both of you,” she said. “I believed it was the only way to secure your future together.”
“Leave.”
At that, Lady Seymore did not argue. She was a woman of too much dignity and, Cressida suspected, too much genuine regret for argument. She straightened, smoothed the front of her gown, and crossed the room with the composure that, under other circumstances, Cressida would have found admirable.
As she passed, she paused beside Cressida’s chair, and the look she gave her was brief but full, and the apology in it was loud. Then she was gone, and the front door closed behind her.
The room resettled around her absence.
Cressida looked at Theodore, but he was already moving away from her. He turned away from the table with the deliberation of a man who had decided that the only useful thing he could do was be somewhere else, before anything further could be asked of him or said in his presence or laid at his feet. The dining hall,with its cooling silver and its confessional aftermath, apparently held nothing he wished to remain in.
She was on her feet before she had consciously decided to stand. Her chair scraped back from the table with an undignified sound, but there was no time for embarrassment.
He was already crossing the threshold into the corridor without looking back.
So she followed him.
Chapter Twenty-One
She found him on the terrace.
He had not gone far. Only as far as the stone balustrade at the far edge, where the garden fell away in long terraced steps toward the dark water of the ornamental lake below. His back was to her, both hands braced against the railing, and from across the flagstones, she could see the tension in the set of his shoulders.
She crossed the terrace slowly, as though approaching a wounded animal, her full attention on him so that she barely even registered the cool night air blowing against her face. She stopped at his side and did not say anything for a moment. Then she took a breath and reached out, laying her hand on his arm.
He flinched, but even that was gone before she could have pointed to it. Still, he did not pull away.
