Page 68 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
The following day was the same. And the one after that. He appeared during meals. Helped with wedding preparations when asked. Spoke to John. Spoke to Caroline.
On the second afternoon, the orphans came for their weekly visit. Edward played with them in the garden while she watched from the terrace. William challenged him to a footrace. Edward let him win. Thomas demanded to be carried on his shoulders. Ruth sat on the garden wall and read to him from a book about pirates, and Edward listened with the focused attention he gave to everything.
The caterpillar boy, whose name was Horace, found a beetle and presented it to Edward as a gift. Edward examined it solemnly. Thanked him. Put it in his coat pocket. Horace beamed.
He says he does not want to be a father,but he has a father’s hands. Patient, steady, and built for holding.
Valeria had to look away. The tenderness of it was too much. The gap between the man who let a three-year-old put a beetle in his pocket and the man who would not meet her eyes across the breakfast table was so wide she could have fallen into it.
When the children left, she went inside and sat at her writing desk. She thought about what she wanted. Not what was safe.Not what a widow of her station was supposed to want. But what she actually wanted.
The question was whether Edward wanted it, too. And whether wanting was enough to make a man who had spent twelve years being a weapon believe he could be something else.
She opened the top drawer. The letters sat inside it, folded and unsent, next to a quill that was running out of ink and a pot of hope she was not sure she had the right to open.
She closed the drawer. The latch clicked. She sat for a long moment in the quiet room, listening to the house settle around her. Somewhere below, Mrs. Grady was cooking something that smelled of rosemary and butter. Somewhere above, a door opened and closed.Hisdoor. His footsteps on the landing.
He was going to the study.
She knew his patterns now. She had learned them the way she had learned Gordon’s, by listening, by counting, by the careful accumulation of knowledge. The difference was that she had learned Gordon’s patterns to survive. She was learning Edward’s because she could not stop.
She found herself doing things to be near him without approaching him directly. She walked past the study when she knew he was inside. She took her tea in the morning room because it overlooked the stables. She chose the chair closest to the window at dinner because the window reflected the far end of the table.
She hated the calculation of it. She had spent three years calculating which rooms were safe and which were not. She was done calculating. She wanted to walk into a room, say that she was there and that she wanted him, and stop being an idiot.
But she did not. Because the man in question was carrying a weight she could not see, and she would not be the one who added to it. She had learned that much from Gordon.
The difference was that Gordon’s weight was cruelty. Edward’s was guilt. And guilt, she was discovering, was harder to shift than cruelty, because the person carrying it believed they deserved it.
She had watched him at dinner the previous evening. He sat with his back to the wall. He ate with his left hand so his right was free. He kept his water glass on the left side of his plate, never the right.
Spy habits. The small, unconscious rituals of a man who had spent twelve years expecting the world to come at him from the right.
On the third afternoon, she found him in the library, standing by the window. The afternoon light filtered through the glass, and he was reading. She watched him before he spotted her. His unguarded face. The furrow between his eyebrows. The way he held the book carefully, the way one holds something fragile.
He looked up and saw her. The book closed. The wall came down. He nodded, polite and distant, and she nodded backbefore walking away. The distance between them was ten feet, an ocean.
She went to the garden. The maze had overgrown since the storm. The hedges had gone wild. She walked through it anyway. The thorns caught her sleeves, but she did not care.
Edward had found the center. On their first walk, he had looked at the maze and walked straight to the middle without making a wrong turn. She had asked him how. He had shrugged. “I read the hedges,” he had said.
He read everything. Rooms and people and threats and the shape of her garden. He read everything except her face, which he was currently refusing to look at. It was the one thing she wanted him to read more than anything in the world.
She turned and walked back to the house. The thorns caught her sleeve one last time. She did not bother to pull them free.
Three days passed. Then four. The wedding was in two days.
Caroline cornered her in the morning room. She was making lists. Caroline was always making lists. Lists of flowers, seating arrangements, things that needed to be done before the wedding and things that needed to be done after the wedding, and, Valeria suspected, a list of things she intended to say to Edward if Valeria did not say them first.
“He is avoiding you,” Caroline observed, hemming a veil Valeria had not asked for. “And you are letting him. I cannot decide which of you is more infuriating.”
“I am giving him space.”
“Space is what you give a skittish horse. You do not give space to the man you are marrying in two days.”
“I will not chase after a man, Caroline. Not again.”
Caroline put down the veil. “Gordon did not want you. Edward does. If you cannot see the difference, then you are not the woman I raised.”
