Deathly pitch. Definitely a deathly pitch. He inched closer to her, hoping his fingers might find the edge of her skirts. “Then make Lady Macintosh’s home yours.” Even if it killed him. “I hope you find as much for yourself here as we have found in you.”
“Thank you. I have done nothing. Yet.” Her voice so soft, he almost did not hear her speak. “I should not say this to you, but I guess I cannot stop myself.”
When she paused, he bumped her shoulder. “You seem to have stopped yourself.”
She gave a breathy laugh. “I am searching for the right way to say I’m scared of disappointing you. And your sister. And my father.”
He shouldn’t. But he, too, could not help himself. He ran his knuckles down her cheek, and she leaned into the caress.
“I find it difficult,” he said, “to imagine being disappointed by you.”
“Ha.” She leaned away from him, and he dropped his hand to his side as she tipped her face up to the sky, inhaling the night air, exhaling warm breath. Apparently releasing her fears, too, because she faced him and said, “I know dukes do not make mistakes, so you must consider this question in the hypothetical sense. Were you to make a mistake, do you… do you think you could shrug it off, set it into the wind, and watch it blow away? Or… or would it live in you? Curl up in your chest and make every breath a pain, haunt your sleeping hours, and make yourwaking ones a misery? Were you to make a mistake… could you forgive yourself or—”
“Lady Emma.”
Still, she looked up, her body frozen, her eyes unblinking, ringed by thick, copper lashes.
“Look at me, Emma.” Finally, she did, and it damn near broke his heart at the pain he saw there. “You know I make mistakes. The day we met, truly met, in my study, you threw mine right in my face. And yes…yesI carry them in my chest like breaths, like heart beats.”
“Makes living quite…”
“Humbling.”
“Precisely.”
He stood, but only long enough to swing around and face her, to kneel before her, and take her hands in his. Hers were cold, and he chaffed them between his palms, trying to warm them. “Mistakes are less difficult to bear when they impact only oneself. And they are almost impossible to survive when—”
“They hurt those we are meant to be protecting.” She pulled her hands from his grasp, curling them on her thighs.
“Precisely.” How did she know his heart so well? As if she’d been formed from its worries and its joys, its fears and its desires.
If he were to carve a name into a desk to calm him… it would be hers.
“I want to tell you something,” she said, her thumb rubbing circles in the dark material draped over her thigh. “But I do not think I should.”
“Do what you think best.” He wanted her secrets, all of them, whatever they were. But if he said that, she would not give them.
“Do not yell.”
He lifted a brow, a playful arch. But something sour rumbled inside him, some grumbling warning.
“I made a mistake in Edinburgh. With a match.” Her fingers clenched, and he wanted to soothe them, to rub his thumb along her knuckles until they loosened. But he hung his hands between his legs, useless damn things, and her hands slowly became fists no soothing could conquer. “I encouraged a match between a friend and a gentleman new to town. It seemed perfect, and my friend grew to think she might love him. I encouraged that feeling until he… until he began to say things to me.”
“What sorts ofthings?”
“Complimenting me mostly. In ways that seemed appropriate, but when paired with how he looked at me… were not appropriate at all.” Telling this story was pinching something in her, making something deep in her soul hurt, a pain writ clearly on her face, across her taut shoulders, in her angry fist and her shattered voice.
The impulse to touch her nearly knocked him over, nearly setting off a chain of actions he’d never be able to take back, but somehow he checked them all and sat next to her once more, the space between them empty but for the need that felt like lightning. He needed a damn outlet, and he found the knife nestled against his ribs beneath his waistcoat with practiced ease, flipped it open, closed, open, closed.
Only thing he could do since he couldn’t pull her onto his lap, kiss her, claim her, protect her.
“I told myself I was pretending,” she said, “but then he sent me a note, and I knew I was not.”
“What did it say?” He did not yell. He kept his voice as quiet as he would be when he danced up behind this man and sliced a lovely red ribbon into his throat.
“The note said he loved me and could not marry my friend. I wrote back, telling him he was wrong, and then I told my friend she should look elsewhere for a husband, but I did not tell herwhy. That, likely the biggest mistake in a debacle rife with them. But I’d hoped that would be the end of it.”
“It was not?”
