“So be someone else.”
“I can’t just be someone else.”
“You’re right.”
She looked up in shock. “You’re right,” he shrugged, “You are who you are. You can’t snap your fingers and be someone else. You have to be you.”
Her shock turned to dismay. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“But,” he took a sip of whiskey. “Who are you?”
Mary froze.
“I don’t know.” She leaned forward, put her elbows on her thighs, and her head in her hands, thus giving him a view through her cleavage nearly down to her navel. This new posture induced a new posture in Gregory’s nether regions. To keep his anatomy at bay, he knew he needed to keep her talking or start talking himself.
“Well, you may not know. You will know though.” She looked at him quizzically. “What I mean to say is, I have always known who I am.”
“That’s not helpful,” she murmured.
He ran his hands through his hair, pushing back some of the sweat that had beaded on his forehead. He decided to lean back and give some distance, some breathing room.
“Yes, I can see how that statement in and of itself is inefficacious. Let me explain.” He drew a deep breath. He had never directly spoken to anyone about his father’s death and Jonathan’s disappearance. It was too muddled. But he felt he had two choices at the moment, to walk away or keep talking, and as his feet had vetoed the first option he spoke of the only thing that came to mind besides Mary.
“I’ve always known who I was,” he held his hand up before Mary could interrupt.” When my father died, who I knew I was became more pronounced. It became an all-consuming reality. I had to be the duke I knew I was. The one I was raised to be. The one I had no choice in becoming. Then a few years after that, Jonathan disappeared. And I lost myself. Jonathan had always been my best friend and then he was my closest support when my father passed away, so when he was gone. I had no one.”
“You had us,” Mary whispered.
Gregory looked up ruefully, and with a hoarse voice, said, “And that’s all I had left.”
He didn’t mean to offend her. But he couldn’t share more. He couldn’t say that he couldn’t bear to lose anyone else, his mother, his sister, her, Mary.
He couldn’t tell her that he needed to keep everyone at arm’s length so that it didn’t hurt anymore.
All he could say was, “I need another drink. You?”
If Mary was flummoxed, she was hiding it well. She extended her ruffle-sleeved arm and accepted another drink.
“This shall be my last.” She smiled at him.
Her smile broke through some unknown crack in the walls around his heart and lightened the weight of his soul.
“Anyways, as you know, after that I left for the continent.”
“Mhmm,” Mary murmured as she placed her head back against the settee and closed her eyes. “Yes, I know. Everyone knows. But does anyone truly know what exactly you did there and why you came back now?”
Feeling somewhat over-exposed, Gregory took up his defenses. “In answer to the first: yes, some know. In answer to the second: I engaged in the usual masculine ways of grieving, drinking, gambling, womanizing.” He detected a slight frown on the last word. “And in answer to the third: I’m here now to be who I was raised to be. Who I know I am. The Duke of Wellingford.”
Gregory heard the faint sound of deep, soft, even breathing.
Mary had fallen asleep.
Gregory was nonplussed at his finding. On one hand he was miffed that she had fallen asleep on him while he was sharing from the heart. On the other hand, this played perfectly into his desire to keep her at arm’s length. Truth be told, he wouldn’t have shared as much as he had except that he needed a distraction from her distracting body parts.
He leaned over and scooped her up into his arms. As he carried her to her room, he could feel her silky tendrils softly tickling his jaw and her warm breath nuzzling his neck, and he began to feel an ache in his heart, that something about his plan wasn’t quite right. That maybe arm’s length was more of an emotional chasm than a means of protection.
How was it possible that this hitherto timid woman kept wiggling her way past his arms’ length rule? How was it possible that she wasn’t being scared off? And how was it possible that maybe he didn’t mind?
Mary awoke from a deep sleep and comfortable dream of being carried close to Gregory’s heart. She wasn’t sure if it was memory or merely a dream that she could smell the faint scent of bay rum and whiskey on her nightwear.
