Page 82 of Caught By the Ruthless Duke
“I have slept,” he confirmed.
“I know. It is what I said.”
The room was warm and smelled of dried lavender and old wood. Theodore had played on this floor as a child, received bad news here and good, and once a lecture on the proper conduct of a gentleman that he had drawn on at various occasions without ever acknowledging its source.
“I did not come to make this easy,” he said.
“I did not expect you to.” She reached for her tea. “Easywould suggest you had made no honest accounting of it.”
“The method was wrong,” he stated.
“Yes.” She put the cup down, no evasion in it. “It was. I knew when I did it that I was choosing the outcome I judged best over the method you deserved a voice in. I made that calculation, and I stand behind the intention.” She met his gaze. “I do not stand behind the breach of your confidence. That part I regret entirely.”
He looked at her for a long moment. She did not lower her eyes.
It would have been simpler if she had collapsed, offered remorse calibrated to his comfort, given him the satisfaction of a woman diminished. In the weeks following her confession, he had more than once imagined such a conversation.
She was giving him something harder: her reasons, standing upright without apology for having them while separating them cleanly from the harm her means had caused. It was the most she could offer, and, he recognized with some difficulty, the most he could reasonably ask for.
“You might have spoken to me directly,” he said.
“You would not have listened.” There was no reproach in it. “We both know what you were that season, Theodore. A directapproach would have resulted in your very finest composed dismissal.”
He could not dispute that.
“I wanted you to be happy,” she said, more quietly. “I know that counts for less than you would have wished, given the manner of it.”
“It counts.” He said it without warmth, and he watched something ease in her that he had not registered as held until it released.
They sat in the particular silence of two people who had known each other long enough that silence carried its own content.
“She is remarkable,” Lady Seymore murmured.
“Yes.”
“I expect she argued for leniency.”
He had not intended to tell her. He found, examining it, that he could not find a good reason to withhold it.
“In the immediate aftermath of the confession,” he confirmed. “Before I had said anything. She said that you had acted out of love.” He delivered it as a plain fact whose significance required no assistance.
Lady Seymore was still. The controlled set of her mouth softened.
“Generous,” she remarked.
“It surprised me,” he said honestly.
“Did it?” She looked at him with the expression she had worn since he was a boy: fond, sharp, slightly more understanding than was ever comfortable. “You have been expecting to be found wanting. For some considerable time.”
He looked at the fire. He did not confirm or deny it, and she did not press.
“She knows what you are, Theodore,” she said when he stood to leave. “Not what you present to the world, but what you actually are.”
He stood with his hat in his hands and the light at his back, and she did not require an answer.
He let himself out, and the thing he felt was not dread.
Cressida had read fourteen pages by the time she heard the front door open.
