Page 105 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Her hair was spread across the pillow. She looked entirely like herself—unhurried, particular, real—and he held the looking for long enough that she raised her eyebrows.
“What,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, but her expression made clear what she thought of that answer.
“I just…I intend to spend a considerable amount of time making up for the past several months,” he said. “I want you to know that I am fully aware of the ground I have to cover.”
Her cheeks exploded in such a beautiful shade of pink, and she laughed, the brightness back in her eyes, differently now. “That is a lawyerly way to frame a declaration.”
“I am not a lawyer,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, and turned her hand under his so that their fingers laced together. “But youaremine.”
He was quiet with that for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”
Chapter Thirty
“Is the Duke of Fairmont at home?”
The footman looked at the card, and at him, and took longer over both than a footman ought. “I shall inquire, Your Grace.”
He was left standing in the hall. Not the morning room, not the library where he and Lucien had sat over the Whitmore papers a fortnight past. The hall, with his hat in his hands and the long-case clock beside him finishing its eleven strokes.
Dominic set the hat on the table and waited.
He had slept through the night for the first time in months and woken with Annabelle’s hair across his arm, and he had lain in the early grey and understood there was one piece of the wreckage he had not yet gone back for.
It stood eighty yards from his own front door.
He had dressed, eaten, and told her nothing except that he had a call to make. She had looked at him over her tea with her head at an angle he had learned not to trust and said only, “Give my regards, then.”
The footman returned. “His Grace will see you.”
The study door stood open at the end of the passage. Lucien was on his feet behind the desk with a letter in one hand, and when Dominic came in, he laid it face down on the blotter and stayed standing.
“Silverford.” The pause ran well past its natural length. “I confess I assumed my man had misread the card.”
“He read it correctly.”
“Evidently.” Lucien came around the desk as far as the fireplace and stopped there.
He offered neither a chair nor wine. On the floor by the fender, half under the coal scuttle, lay a small painted horse with one wheel missing, and Dominic looked at it while Lucien looked at him.
“Say what you came to say.”
Dominic had arranged it on the walk over. Standing in the room, he abandoned the arrangement.
“You were right to be angry,” he said. “You have been right since the morning you hit me in my own study. I want that said plainly before anything else. You deserved better from me. Annabelle deserved better from me. Every bit of your anger was earned, and I have spent months resenting you for it because resenting you was easier than agreeing with you.”
Lucien’s jaw shifted. He set his forearm along the mantel.
“That is handsomely put.” His voice stayed flat. “It changes nothing about what happened to her.”
“No,” Dominic said. “It doesn’t.”
“You compromised my sister in a garden with half the ton in earshot. And by every account that reached me—and accounts did reach me—you installed her in your house like a guest of long standing and kept your distance from her.” He had not raised his voice at any point, which landed harder than shouting; Dominic had heard him shout exactly once, and it had cost less to stand under. “Elinor sat with her more than once in those weeks. Do you know what my wife observed?”
“I can guess.”
