Page 98 of Duke of Moonstone
Another pause. Frances pressed her back against the wall. The plaster was cold through her nightgown. Her heart was beating very hard—too hard, loud enough that she was half-certain they would hear it through the floor.
“Frances is a good woman,” Alexander said. His voice was even. Controlled. The voice of a man delivering a report rather than a confession. “She has been more than I expected. More than I deserved, perhaps. But the arrangement was clear from the beginning. We both understood the terms.”
“Terms,” Eleanor repeated. The word carried the same weight it had when Lavinia said it, months ago, on a terrace in Surrey.
“When we return to London,” Alexander continued, “we will resume our lives as planned. Separately, for the most part. That was always the intention.”
The word landed in Frances’s chest like a fist, and she closed her eyes.
Last night, he asked her to stay. Last night, they lay in this bed side by side, and the silence between them was so heavy that she thought…
I thought wrong.
CHAPTER 33
“Do you actually want that?” Eleanor pressed on. “Separate lives. Separate everything. Is that truly what you want?”
Alexander set down his teacup. The kitchen was warm, and Eleanor stood at the table with her arms crossed and that particular tilt to her chin that meant she had no intention of letting this go.
“It is what was agreed,” he said.
“That is not what I asked.”
“No,” he said. “It is not what I want.”
Eleanor’s arms uncrossed. She leaned forward. “Then why on earth did you tell me?—”
“Because it is the truth of the arrangement, Eleanor. What I want is irrelevant when the other party has made her wishes clear.”
“Her wishes.” Eleanor pulled out a chair and sat. “What wishes? What has she said?”
Alexander’s jaw tightened. He thought of the breakfast table at Whitestone. Weeks ago. A lifetime ago. Frances’ voice telling him she did not want children. Not with him. Not within this arrangement. The words had landed like stones in water, and he had agreed because what else was there to do when a woman you had married under false pretenses told you plainly that she did not want your future?
“She does not wish to build a family with me,” he said. “She was direct about it. I will not dishonor that by pretending otherwise.”
“Alexander.” Eleanor reached across the table. Her hand covered his. “That was weeks ago. Things have changed. You have changed. I have watched you with her these past two days, the way you look at each other, the way you?—”
“Eleanor.”
“You are in love with her.”
The words hung in the kitchen like smoke. He did not deny them. He could not. The denial would have been a lie so transparent that even his own sister, who had known him fortwenty years and seen him dissemble with the best of them, would have laughed.
“What Frances wants,” he said, “has not changed. She has given me no indication?—”
“People change their minds.” Eleanor squeezed his hand. “People change their hearts. You changed yours about Malcolm. About this wedding. About love itself if I am not mistaken.”
He looked at their joined hands on the table. His sister’s fingers.
Perhaps she might.
The thought emerged before he could halt it. Fragile and perilous, it was the kind of hope a man held in his chest like a lit match close to dry kindling—one wrong breath and everything could ignite.
He did not say it aloud. He could not. Voicing it would make it real, and real things could be broken.
“I should find Frances,” he said. He pulled his hand free and stood. “We had planned to discuss the route north.”
Eleanor watched him go. He felt her gaze on his back all the way to the door.
