Page 101 of Duke of Moonstone
Margaret sat in a chair by the hearth, her shawl drawn around her shoulders, her eyes sharp and clear in the lamplight.
“Tell me what happened in Scotland.”
“Eleanor is married. The ceremony was?—”
“Not Eleanor.” Margaret’s hand rose. One finger pointed at him. “Frances. Tell me about Frances.”
His jaw set. “She has gone to Evermere. To her sister.”
“I am aware of where she has gone. I am asking why.”
“She said she needed time.”
“Time for what?”
“She did not specify.”
Margaret looked at him. The look lasted long enough to become uncomfortable. Then she leaned forward.
“You have mistaken restraint for strength,” she said. “For years. You have told yourself that holding everything at arm’s length is the same as being strong, and it is not. It never has been.”
“Mother—”
“I watched your father do the same thing. Not with discipline, his failing was the opposite, but with honesty. He could neversay what he felt plainly, and it cost him. It cost us both.” Her eyes did not waver. “Do not make his mistake with different armor.”
“I have no idea what you are suggesting I?—”
“You love her.”
The words dropped into the room like a stone into still water.
“If you want her to come back,” Margaret continued, “you must stop speaking to her as though she is an entry in your ledger. She is not an arrangement, Alexander. She is not a duty, an obligation, or a problem to be managed. She is your wife.”
“I know she is my wife.”
“Then speak to her as one. Speak to her as your beloved. Because that is what she is, whether you have said it or not.”
The denial rose to his lips. The same denial he had given himself for weeks: in the library, in the carriage, in the dark beside her sleeping form.The arrangement was clear. The terms were set. Feeling is the enemy of function.
The words died. They simply stopped. Midway between his chest and his mouth, they lost their strength and fell silent, leaving behind a vast emptiness pressing against his ribs with such force that it made the room tilt.
He loved her entirely. All of her: her patience, her warmth, the way she knelt on marble floors for a child who was not hers, the way she laughed in taverns with strangers, and the way she looked at him across crowded rooms as if he were the only person worth noticing.
Perhaps I have loved her since the garden. Since the masquerade. Since she stood in the moonlight with her mask in her hand and her face turned up to mine, and I thought—there. That one. Her.
He had been too afraid of the word to admit it.
CHAPTER 34
“You have been here three days,” Lavinia said. “And you have smiled exactly twice. Both times at the cat.”
Frances looked up from the book she had not been reading. Her sister stood in the doorway of the drawing room at Evermere, arms crossed, her dark hair pinned with the severe precision that indicated she had been thinking about something for a long time and had finally decided to say it.
“I smile at other things,” Frances said.
“Name one.”
Frances opened her mouth then closed it.
