She inclined her head to accept his apology. She was grateful for it—more grateful still because she didn’t know very many men who would have given it.
“You wanted to leave. Desperately.”
A short nod.
“And if I don’t marry Gilbert? Will you still leave?”
“I’ve planned on it too long not to,” he said. There was something in his voice though, something that was too hesitant and ephemeral to be certainty. Something like doubt.
“And the Kingdom?”
“The Kingdom doesn’t need me or a Dartham or Far Hope. It will survive.”
“But what about you?” she asked. “Will you survive?” If she were Jarrell—if she had access to a world like the one he described—she didn’t know that she’d be able to deny herself a single year, much less sixteen.
He stepped away from the window and sat in a chair by the fire. The orangeish light threw the lines around his eyes and mouth into sharp, delicious contrast. “It’s too late for me, Eleanor,” he said. “At first, people told me that the sadness would pass. That the cure for loneliness was company. But I felt lonelier with people. I felt sadder whenever joy was anywhere near. It was a perverse kind of grief, because time seemed to feed it rather than starve it, and no matter where I went or what I beheld, it was right there next to me, like an extension of myself. It made me into a man I didn’t even recognize—rough and grim and hard—and incapable of so many things that I used to be capable of. I don’t know that I could inject myself back into the Kingdom even if I wanted to.”
He recited this last part as if it were someone else’s story, as if he had rehearsed it to himself many times. But his fingers curled around the arms of the chair, like he could anchor himself to the world if he gripped hard enough. Like the memory of Helena threatened to snap him in half.
“I suppose it’s a sin to grieve this much,” he finished in a murmur. “I had a priest tell me so once. But sometimes I think that if I let it go—let Helena go, let the memory of my parents and brother go—I’ll no longer know who I am. I’ve lived with this too long to live without it now.”
“It seems to me that your sin isn’t grief, then, but fear,” she said. Gently.
His eyes were a near-purple in the firelight, his carved muscles visible under the thin linen of his shirt. Even now, in this modern and sophisticatedly furnished house, he was tense, restless, feral.
Of course, he was.
Ajax Dartham, civilized? Ajax Dartham, mild? It was like asking the moors to become farmland. Like asking granite to become loam. It simply wasn’t possible.
“Do you know yet, Eleanor, what it is like to adore someone thusly?”
Yes, she thought. I do.
“It was more than desire or affection,” he said. “I loved her. Would have died for her. And to watch her die instead in the very place where she was supposed to live and thrive . . .”
“Would she not,” she said softly, “still want you to live and thrive?”
“The priest said that also,” he mumbled.
She’d never known a grief like his, and it felt unkind to diminish it. But it seemed to her like such a waste, like a shipment of cracked tiles or garden tucked too far into the shade. If she at twenty could cope with having seventeen different feelings inside herself at once, then surely he could too.
She could not talk someone out of grief, but she could talk someone into sense.
She clutched the blanket to her chest and slowly crawled on her knees to him, stopping only once she was at his feet.
“Ajax,” she whispered. “Ajax, look at me.”
The duke looked. His eyes were still dark—nearly as dark as the sky outside.
“You are not broken. You are allowed to keep living.”
She put her hands just above his knees. His silk-clad thighs were so firm, so warm, and she couldn’t help but slide her palms over the hard muscles, up to his hips and then back down to his knees again. His erection was imprinted on the other side of his breeches—she could make out its length, its ridges, its male topography—and it surged between his hips every time she caressed his thighs.
His hand caught hers and arrested its motion. His eyes were as dangerous as his voice was broken. “Be careful, Eleanor.”
“I’m taking a great deal of care,” she whispered, allowing her fingertips to brush against his thigh again.
The duke reached a large hand down and touched her jaw—reverently, delicately—and hope slashed through her, as hot and bright as the lightning outside the window.
“Can’t you hold it all inside yourself at the same time? The love for who you’ve lost and the possibility of more?” She kept her voice soft. “I wouldn’t ask you to let go. Only to allow yourself more.”
“I don’t know, Eleanor,” he said. “I don’t know if I can ever marry again.”
Although the regret in his voice was palpable, it did nothing to soothe the bruising ache of his reply. But she should not have been bruised, she should have known better—she had known better, after all. He’d never given her any reason to think otherwise. It was only her reaching for more and more, reaching for someone who didn’t want her in return.
He is not the only thing you can have. There is something else.
A life that could be almost completely her own, not as an almost-spinster, but as an almost-queen. She bit her lip, ran through all the different possibilities in her mind, imagined each and every sign at that crossroads, each and every ship waiting at her dock.
Every future beyond the mist.
Then she made her choice.
“I’m not talking about marriage,” she said, nuzzling into his touch. “Make love to me, Ajax.”
He hauled her into his lap as if she weighed nothing and cradled her face in his hands.
“Eleanor….” he murmured. “Sweet Eleanor.”
She met his searching stare, watching the reflected flames sparkling in their indigo depths. He was the answer to a question she hadn’t known enough to ask. He was a dream she hadn’t known enough to dream before she came to Far Hope.
“Please,” she asked. “Please.”
Chapter Ten
Her request was like a hot knife to the throat. How could he say yes?
But how could he say no?
He wanted her like nothing else; with her, he could almost imagine living again, truly living, with all that it entailed.
What a mistress of Far Hope she would have made, he thought with a sear of regret. What a world I could have given her. If he weren’t already pledged to his ghosts…
But it wasn’t only his past that lay between them.
“Give me this,” Eleanor said. She was perched on his lap like a little queen, and there was something very queenly indeed in the lift of her chin and the flash of her eyes. It married quite well with the hunger in her voice and the flush on her chest—and with the subtle squeeze of her thighs and the greedy points of her nipples making themselves known even through the blanket. “I don’t expect marriage afterwards, or a declaration of love,” she added. “I only expect you.”
He let go of her face to sift her hair through his fingers. “You must see that it’s not so easy,” he replied. “What if you wish to marry someday?”