Page 61 of The Duke and His Jilted Bride

“I don’t know why I should.” He knew what she was getting at slowly, what Seraphina must have implied. He didn’t want to have this conversation. It was unnecessary, only painful for her. But she looked at him and waited, and he realised then that he had lost the ability to deny her things even when they cost him. So he started telling her what she thought she wanted to hear.

The party had been in the late summer. His grandmother had harangued him for months by then, telling him that the engagement had to be formalised. “You are the Duke now,” she had said time and time again. “Lady Seraphina is a good match. Her family expects it. Your family expects it. So do it. Why stall?”

He had come back from his grand tour with the intention of settling into the title, ultimately finding that the estate, the work and the politics, the things he was bred for, made sense to him – and that the rest, the social arrangements his parents had set in motion before they died, made up a skin that didn't fit, that he was being told to wear anyway over his bones.

“Seraphina had been at the house party,” he continued. “And late one evening, we had been alone. I don’t know how she found me, or why. I had wine – that was no excuse. But perhaps without it I would not have acted rashly.” He stared at his hands where they were folded in front of him. He couldn’t stand to look at Aurelia, feeling like an embarrassed child. “I had thought, this is what you do, you must try. So I… Yes, I kissed her.”

The memory was distorted and hazy. It was a brief kiss. It was immediately and obviously wrong. They had stepped back from each other. In Seraphina’s face he saw the same disgusted resignation he had been feeling for years – and that made it worse than if she had seemed happy for his touch.

“She looked,” he continued, pinching the skin between his thumb and forefinger, “like she had confirmed something she had already suspected. And I felt like a fool. We never spoke of it again. The engagement continued because… Well, what else would we do after that? Our families, the expectation… there was no clean way out of it. And then Frederick found a nasty way out for both of us, which I suspect suited Seraphina considerably more than she has admitted to anyone, including Frederick at the time.”

Aurelia was quiet for a moment. “She wasn't in love with you.”

“Of course not. Far from it. I told you this already. A moment like that changes nothing. I was not surprised by that discovery, at the time. I was surprised by my own discovery… that I had kissed her and felt nothing, and felt worse about the nothing than I would have felt about a rejection.”

“Why worse?”

“Because a rejection would have meant there was something to reject. The absence of feeling just meant we were two people who had made a mutual error and were both too well-bred to say so aloud. I hated myself for it. A little for kissing her, yes, though that was merely foolish. But primarily for the realisation that I had been going along with the whole arrangement for years without ever asking myself whether I actually wanted any of it.”

Aurelia looked at him. “Did you? Want any of it, ever?”

“The house, of course,” he said. “The estate and the title. Yes, I wanted those for ever. They were my right, second in my heart only to my family. I had always wanted those. But the rest…?” The rest I had simply assumed would become real if I gave it enough time. I was mistaken.”

She was quiet again. Nike shifted under her hand, and she resumed the slow movement without seeming to notice. Evander watched from below his lashline, too self-conscious to raise his head fully so she would see his face. Would Aurelia despise him? Would she think he had been a rake? Beyond kissing Seraphina he had never– he had never thought or intended anything with a woman. He had only ever tried to do things right, and now he was catastrophically failing even at that, his legal marriage.

“She told me,” Aurelia said, “that it reminded her of the way you looked at me today, just before she and Frederick appeared. That’s why she said it. At least, that’s why she claimed she said it.” There was an edge to her voice he hadn’t heard before, right before she paused. “She said it looked like a kiss had been about to happen between us.”

He nodded. Maybe there had been.

“I'm not angry about what happened two years ago,” Aurelia said. “I don’t like it. But I understand what it was. I'm just angry that she said it. And I'm angrier that it worked… that I spent the entire walk back to the house doubting something I should not have to doubt. I don't understand what she wants, and I don’t know what you want either.”

“Neither do I.” He said it honestly, and then said the thing that had been sitting at the back of his mind since his brother’s arrival. “It concerns me, what Frederick has married into.”

“She is not unkind to him.”

“Perhaps not. But Frederick is not a proficient reader of women. He never has been. He feels things very strongly and assumes other people are feeling them equally. It doesn't always occur to him to check whether his instincts are right.”

“I think she loves him,” Aurelia said, though she didn’t sound half as confident as the words suggested, which was not much in the first place. “In her way, I think she does. But the rest of what she does, I don’t understand.”

Aurelia nodded slowly at his silent agreement. She looked at the fire for a long moment, then took in a breath and turned toward him.

“Why didn't you tell me? When they arrived, or even before that… It feels important.”

“To you, maybe. I didn’t speak about it because it never occurred to me to speak about it. Perhaps I was wrong about that.”

“Yes,” she said. “To me, you were.”

He looked at her directly. “Then I can only ask for your forgiveness. Perhaps these secrets are what have been keeping you from me.”

She raised a brow, a half-smile pulling at her mouth. “I have not been keeping from you, Evander. By my estimation it has been precisely the opposite.”

Something shifted in her face. She looked back at the fire.

“The house party meant nothing,” he said. “And anything I have done that you have found disagreeable has not been intentional. I know that is what I am supposed to say, but I am also saying it because it is true. Everything before our marriage only taught me what nothing felt like…” He stopped, considered what he was going to say next, found the rest of it in the part of his mind he tended to the least. “I have been trying to understand the difference ever since. There has been a difference… Am I even making sense?”

She looked at him and shook her head slowly back and forth. He reached over the space between them and took her hand. She let him adjust her fingers in his, finding the right way to hold her. Nike opened one eye and closed it again, leaving them be. It was the only audience he could tolerate while he made such a fool of himself.

“With you,” he said, “everything is different. So I am sorry for every time I have made it difficult to believe.” He looked at their hands. “You were supposed to be my brother’s wife. I was supposed to be with another woman to whom I was indifferent. The fact that everything has changed, and that what should have been is so vivid in my mind, cemented there by months and years of expectation… I can’t… I cannot…”