My Darling Duke

She pressed two fingers to her badly trembling lips. The dark depths of her eyes were reflecting so many emotions, they took his breath. “Alexander…you do not mean what you say. I—”

“I am perfectly lucid, Miss Danvers. This show of emotion is entirely unnecessary and unwelcome,” he said in deliberate accents of withering scorn. His voice sounded rough, foreign to his ears.

Katherine stared at him wordlessly. The look of rejection in her eyes was unbearable to witness. That pain unmoored him, made him want to bow his back and scream. But his burdens were never anyone else’s to bear, just his alone. That had been his will for more than ten years, and it would continue so.

He wanted to lay the world at her feet; he wanted to know her dreams so they could also be his, and to cage such a wonderful spirit as hers would be a grave sin that he couldn’t condone because he loved her, utterly and completely.

Sweet Christ. The awareness was like a honeyed blade, painfully cutting but wonderfully sweet. The agony that stabbed at his chest felt as if a physical knife had pierced him. “You are no longer my captive… Now go!”

She dipped into a mocking curtsy. “Of course. As…as you wish, Your Grace.”

Her lips trembled, but a fierce and unwavering pride shone from eyes washed with tears. She turned away from him and moved brusquely toward the door. But he saw the stiffness in her frame. He almost called her back, begged her to share the darkness that would once again come for him. Alexander could always feel it crashing against his senses, taking the pinprick of light that had been inside him these past few weeks. The door opened soundlessly, and she slipped through like a waif without looking back.

I love you, Katherine. God, I love you.

He bit into his lip until he tasted blood, as he fought the need to shout for her to come back, please. A profound welling of desolation swamped his senses. He allowed it to drown him, taking away the light Katherine had placed in his heart in the form of hope.

…

Alexander felt weak and depleted, but blessedly the ravaging heat had lessened, and only a slight throb remained in his lower back. A cool finger brushed against his forehead. “The fever has broken,” Penny said softly. A gentle kiss against his cheek elicited a vexed snort from him, and it felt good to hear her laugh.

“Rest. Do not be your stubborn self and move from this bed,” she encouraged, and then her presence vanished.

He closed his eyes, taking stock of the various pains and aches within his body.

“He might not walk again.”

“We shall perhaps need to operate on him.”

“He might need opium for the pain. The diluted bit in laudanum will not do.”

The whispers of his doctors echoed while he had thrashed as fever rattled around his head. Alexander grabbed the sheets covering his lower limbs and tossed them aside. He stared at his feet, trying to take stock of the varied sensations running through his body.

An unexplained sense of urgency did not have him tarrying long on that matter. With a groan, Alexander pushed onto his elbows and up, bracing his back against the headboard, and then scanned the room. He tried to remember all that had happened, recalling only the terrible pain that had burned its fiery path along his back, the spasming, and Katherine’s cries of alarm.

Katherine.

He sensed a presence in the room but knew it was not her. If it had been Katherine, every part of him would have surged to life. “How long have you been here?”

“More than an hour,” his cousin murmured. Indecipherable emotions twisted in his voice and scraped at Alexander.

“I need no expression of pity or remonstrance. I’ve had enough for the last ten years.” His voice cracked like a whip through the room.

For several moments, Eugene made no answer. Then he replied, “I have never pitied you, Alexander. A stronger man I’ve not had the privilege to know. My only desire is to inform you that you are never alone.”

Alexander glanced around the room, a shadow of discomfort lurking in his mind. Unexpectedly, his heart ached, and a feeling akin to fear settled in his bones. “Where is Miss Danvers?”

A shadow detached itself from the wall, and Eugene stepped from the window where he’d been overlooking the lawns of the northern side of the estate, then made his way over to the bed.

He made no reply, and unease wafted through Alexander. “Where is she?” he demanded.

“A couple of hours ago, she left this room with such haste, it was as if the devil chased her. There were many tears on her face. And in her eyes, I have never witnessed such heartbreak.”

You now bore me… Go.

The memory washed over him in an unrelenting wave of unexpected pain. He ruthlessly suppressed the tangled emotions, trying to accept that it was for the best. “I see,” he murmured, dropping back against the headboard and lifting his head to stare at the painted ceiling of his chamber.

The cold insouciance that had normally cloaked his emotions seemed impossible to find. His heart pounded a desperate, furious rhythm, and he held the sheets in a tight fist which gripped, struggling against the feelings hammering at his heart. Silence. Loneliness. The empty spaces where he could always find solace were filled with jangled, complex sensations he did not understand for having never endured them before.