Page 77 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“You said what you needed to say.” He reached for his coat, draped over the back of a chair, and pulled it on mechanically, buttoning it without looking at her. “You were right to say it. I will speak with Lady Hathaway this afternoon and ensure the incident is framed as a disagreement between gentlemen, unrelated to you. Frederick will hear a version that protects your standing. I will manage it.”

“Stop.”

He buttoned his coat without looking at her.

“Stop managing,” she said. “Stop arranging and correcting and shielding me from consequences. That is what I came here to say.”

He raised his head, and her heart suddenly ached inexplicably as their eyes met.

“Then I will stop,” he said.

He crossed the morning room. His sleeve brushed her arm as he passed her. The contact lasted less than a second, and yet it carried more honesty than anything either of them had said.

He opened the door.

“Oliver.”

He paused with his hand on the frame, his back to her, the tension visible in the locked line of his spine and his whitened fingers against the wood.

“Please do not walk away from me,” she whispered.

He stood motionless, and for a few seconds she believed that he would turn. Then he let go of the door frame and walked into the corridor. His footsteps moved away from her, measured and even, growing fainter until the house absorbed them and left her standing in the empty drawing room.

Louisa pressed her bruised wrist against her ribs. She had not even begun an attempt to make sense of what she was feeling, when the butler appeared at the threshold. “Shall I call a carriage for you, miss?”

“No, thank you. I shall walk.”

The truth followed her all the way home, grabbing at her heart with icy fingers. She had come to depend on him. And she had no idea how to stop.

CHAPTER 23

“He is not coming, is he?”

Eleanor asked the question gently, carefully. They stood near the tall windows of Mrs. Alderton’s drawing room, where the second musicale of the month was attracting its usual crowd of guests who had run out of better options for the evening. The soprano from the previous gathering had been replaced by a violinist whose enthusiasm exceeded his ability by a considerable margin.

Louisa kept her eyes on the door.

“He may be late.”

“Oh, Louisa…” Eleanor cut off whatever it was she had wanted to say, and Louisa blinked furiously.

Louisa pressed her thumbnail into the seam of her glove again, a habit she had noticed herself developing and could not stop. The fabric was wearing thin at the spot. She would need to mend it again.

“He told me he would stop,” she said quietly. “I asked him to stop managing me. He is doing what I asked.”

“You asked him to stop shielding you. You did not ask him to disappear from the face of the earth.”

The distinction was precise and painful, and Louisa had no answer for it. She had spent the first three days angry. He had done exactly what she asked. He had stopped. Stopped calling on her. Stopped appearing at her elbow in ballrooms. It was as though he had ceased to exist.

She had asked for this.

On the fourth day, the anger thinned into an ache that lodged beneath her ribs where his laughter used to sit. She caught herself listening for the knocker at three o’clock on Tuesday, then hating herself for listening. She chose the blue dress he had complimented and then changed out of it. She carried the fan he had insisted she learn to use and did not once raise it, because there was no one across the room watching for the signal.

By the second week, she had stopped pretending the ache was anger, or pride, or anything she could name without her voice breaking. She missed him. She missed him the way one misses warmth after stepping into a cold room, wholly, physically, in every part of her body that remembered what it felt like to be near him.

“Frederick has been very attentive,” she offered, though it sounded hollow even to her own ears.

Eleanor’s silence said more than any reply could have.