“You agree?” Willow asked, taken aback.
“I know you are not my sister, Willow,” he dragged a hand through his hair. “I will always believe I could have done more to save her, and I will always be a devil to live with, but that is why I have not enforced the rules with you. I didn’t want you to feel like a prisoner in our home.”
“Then why draw them up?”
He shook his head. “I only created them because when the reality set in that I was about to take a wife—become the protector of another woman—I panicked. The pain of losing my sister rushed back, and I did not wish to go through that again.”
His soft admission brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them away. Their gazes collided, and what she saw in them sent a burning sensation through her belly. She had fallen hopelessly in love with her husband.
“Now you know.”
Yes, but it didn’t change anything. It didn’t change what he’d hidden from her or that he’d chosen grievance of her sister over their future.
Staring down at the doom of her future, Willow wondered at the next step. Liberate her sister, she supposed. After that was anyone’s guess.
His eyes were guarded, watching her from beneath long lashes. He looked miserable, and Willow wanted to give in and fly to his arms. But she wouldn’t.
“There was always the possibility you’d not change your mind,” she closed her eyes before opening them again, “but I’d at least thought you’d inform me that you found my sister. That you planned on going through with your intentions.”
The statement hung between them, silence stretching.
Curses! The man had her vacillating between wanting to kiss him and kill him. Willow glanced away from him, back to the empty fireside. To think only an hour ago they’d been happy. An hour ago, they had been sleeping in each other’s arms, content and sated. An hour ago, she’d been thrilled by the prospect of a true family with Ambrose. Now . . . now she didn’t know what she wanted.
She didn’t know if she could ever forgive him.
She didn’t know what that meant for her dreams.
“Please go.”
“Willow. . .”
“Please, I just want to be alone,” she practically begged. “I understand now, the way you are, but it doesn’t change what happened. It does not change that you chose to keep my sister from me. It does tell me that I don’t mean as much to you as I had begun to believe.” She paused, keeping her eyes on the dead hearth almost symbolic in its appearance. “Please go.”
Willow would plead no favors. She would not beg he release her sister. It was time to take matters into her own hands.
“Please just read the rules on your desk.”
There was a moment of punishing silence, and only once the soft thud of his footsteps receded did Willow whirl around and glare at the door separating them. Honestly! He wanted her to read his rules at a time like this? After what he’d just confessed. Fine, she would read his blasted rules,thenshe would burn them,thenshe would go forth and purposefully break each and every one of them!
She marched over to the desk and tried to set them on fire with her eyes. When that failed, she snatched them up, fully intending to read them out loud—to scream them out at the adjoining room.
Boundaries for the Duchess of St. Ives.
What a lark. She flipped the page over to cry out the first rule at the top of her voice. Frowned. And flipped through the rest of the papers, examining them top to bottom, back to front.
They were all blank.
Much to her mortification, she burst into tears.
Ambrose strode back to his room, seething and despairing.
He should never have waited. He should have told her the moment his men informed him that they’d found Holly. But instead, he’d teetered with indecision and then pettily thought that Miss Middleton could wait a night for him to make his grand announcement.
Damn Warton to the seven bowls of hell. Everything had gone to shit and all because that bastard had marched into their home with thunder and bluster in the middle of the night. He’d trampled on Ambrose’s plan and he’d ruined the ground Ambrose had gained with his wife.
With a curse, he paced the length of his chamber, dragging his hands through his hair. She had made no demands for him to release her sister, hadn’t made the slightest reference to the fact, only stared into the empty hearth with a resignation he had put there. That alone confirmed what he’d realized standing on the stairs bickering with Warton.
Ambrose could no longer let Holly go. At least, not in the straight-forward manner.
