“I’m just glad you’re safe,” the Marquess murmured to Eleanor as they walked. “I wish that you’d come to me instead.”
Perhaps the betrothal would be easier to break than Jarrell had thought, which was a relief. He’d, of course, make sure the Vanes were compensated, but a broken engagement was a difficult thing to recompense for. The social costs would be vast, and no less punishing for how difficult they were to quantify. Jarrell pondered this as they reached the library and he closed the doors behind them.
“Now,” he said, as the Vanes took seats near the fireplace, looking at him expectantly. “After last night, Eleanor has decided—”
Eleanor interrupted him. “I’m still marrying Gilbert.”
The Marquess and the Countess’s mouths dropped in tandem.
Jarrell’s glass-filled heart stopped beating.
“Excuse me?” he managed to say.
“I plan on going through with the wedding,” she explained calmly. Blandly. As if she hadn’t just lit him on fire and kicked him into a pit. “I’ll be his wife.”
“Like hell you will,” he said, ignoring Lady Pennard’s gasp at his language.
Something glimmered behind Eleanor’s serene eyes then—something that looked a lot like fury. Good! He wanted her fury; he’d take her hatred. He’d rather have her hissing and spitting and real than acting as if it cost her nothing to marry a man she didn’t love and could never respect.
“You have no say in the matter, Your Grace,” she said, her eyes flashing and her voice tight. With a deep breath, she seemed to steady herself, and when she spoke again, she was even-tempered Eleanor once more. “I’ve given the matter much thought since last night, and I’ve decided I shall marry Gilbert after all.”
Over my goddamn dead body, he wanted to yell. But he didn’t.
It was Eleanor who angled toward her parents and said, “Could the duke and I speak alone for a moment?”
“It’s hardly proper—” the Countess started, but Eleanor interrupted her.
“What about anything I’ve done since last night has been proper? A few minutes in a library is hardly going to dent my reputation at this point. Besides, you and Papa owe me the chance to handle my own marriage for once, wouldn’t you agree?”
The Countess looked very much like she wanted to argue, but the Marquess nodded and then stood, helping his wife to his feet.
“This once,” he said. “You have twenty minutes.”
And then her parents left, closing the library door behind them.
The moment they were alone, Eleanor set her expression in that resolute mildness that vexed him so much. “My mind is made up, Ajax.”
He stepped closer to her. She merely lifted her chin.
“You’re lucky I didn’t throw you over my shoulder and carry you to my bedroom,” he said, roiling with anger and panic and something else he couldn’t name. “You’re lucky I’m not tying you to my bed so I can talk some sense into you!”
A subtly raised brow. “I think I’ve made it very clear that none of those things would be a deterrent for me.”
“Eleanor, this is no joking matter.”
“I’m not joking, Ajax.”
With a curse, he spun away, raking a hand over his face. When he turned back to her and saw her arms wrapped around herself, saw the smudges under her eyes from her sleepless night, he could hardly breathe or think. He never wanted her sad; he never wanted her lonely. He never wanted her marching bravely into a marriage she would hate.
And yourself? What do you want for yourself?
He hadn’t honestly asked himself that question in sixteen years. And now that he asked it, the answer felt obvious.
He didn’t want to exile himself. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with ghosts.
He wanted Eleanor and his friends and his life; he wanted to keep loving the people he’d lost while he learned to love new people too. Like this library, where old books were shelved alongside the new—couldn’t he keep the old and the new inside himself too? Couldn’t he have both?
This was what Eleanor had meant about his sins. He’d known it when she’d said it, but he let himself really know it now.
He’d been afraid to make new memories alongside the old ones. He’d been afraid of loving someone else only to watch them die again. All this time he’d thought the answer to that fear was to retreat, to find some kind of numb safety far, far away, but he’d been wrong.
So wrong.
He scrubbed his hands through his hair and tried to focus on the immediate problem. The problem he’d made.
“You don’t want to marry my nephew,” Jarrell said, trying to understand. “And this morning, you told me—you said you’d chosen, you said you wanted to come back here so I could help you break the betrothal.”
“You are correct in that I don’t wish to marry Gilbert,” she said as she stood and moved over to a deep window looking out to the valley. “But I only said I wanted to come back here. Not that I wanted to break the betrothal.”
I’ll return to Far Hope, Your Grace.
Why hadn’t he seen it then?
She’d said it with so much forbearance, with so much tired courage, and he’d attributed that to the imminent headache of killing a betrothal close to the ceremony—but it hadn’t been that, had it? It hadn’t been the understandable apprehension of an aborted wedding, but rather the unhappy nerves of contemplating a consummated one.
Fury surged at the thought of that consummation; a dark, possessive anger had him striding over to Eleanor and setting her on the high sill of the window. He braced his hands on either side of her and leaned in. “You aren’t marrying him.”
“I. Am.”
He was too close to her, too dangerously close. He could see the taut curves of her breasts heaving under the diaphanous drape of her fichu; he could see how wide her pupils had blown at his nearness. He could see how she swallowed and shifted and licked her lower lip.
“You’re not, Eleanor. Why don’t you raise your skirts for me, hm?”
That telltale flush bloomed on her cheeks and chest, and she slowly lifted her skirts over her knees as she said, “Making love to me won’t change my mind.”
He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t even know what he felt in that moment, except an urgency that nearly clawed him apart. He had himself unfastened and freed in a moment, had her moved to the edge of the sill and her thighs parted wide for him to step between. The minute he wedged the wide tip of him against her furrow, she started panting.
“Don’t make me wait,” she said, bracing herself back on her hands, as if to see his crude invasion better.
“You’re not wet enough.”
“I’ll get there,” she said impatiently. “But I can’t wait another sec—ohhh.”
In his prime, the Duke of Jarrell had been able to divest a woman of a robe a l’anglaise—with its assorted pins, paddings, petticoats, and stays—within a swift two minutes. But the new, simpler fashions meant that he’d unlaced the top of Eleanor’s gown and liberated her breasts from her chemise within seconds. He had a nipple captured in his mouth and his thumb on the bundle of nerves at the top of her sex so quickly that she was struck speechless, her hand flying to the back of his head to push his mouth harder against her.