“Cheverley.” The syllables of his name broke into distinct peace within the duke’s labored breath.
“Yes, Your Grace,” Chev acknowledged. Leave it to the duke to be the only one who recognized him at first sight.
Why did words disappear when most needed? Why, when Chev had so much to say, could he only stare into his father’s gaze, wrestling with the overwhelming urge to weep?
“Hades.” Fear flickered behind the duke’s eyes. “Are you here to take me?”
His Grace’s voice was halting. Labored. As if it took great pain and thought to say each word.
“No.” Cheverley’s gaze flicked to the door to the sitting room and back. “I believe I’ve been summoned to bring you back.”
“I sent you away.”
Chev inhaled sharply. “You did.”
His gaze took in Chev’s face, his form. “You’ve suffered.”
“I have.” He was not going to lie.
He’d staggered so close to death, he was often surprised to wake from sleep.
He’d danced with oblivion, gazed—shamefully longing—into the emptiness.
He knew humiliation. Desperation.
When banished, he’d resolved to return a hero...
He blinked.
What, exactly, was a hero?
Did strength make a hero? Skill? Cleverness?
At the height of His Grace’s power, the duke had embodied all three, and yet there’d been little in him to admire.
His father moaned. He rested his wounded arm against his father’s chest and covered the old man’s forehead with his other hand. “Cheverley.”
“I am here,” he said. “Penelope is here.”
The duke opened his eyes—fearful again. “She is kind.”
Chev lifted a brow. Undeserved kindness had a peculiar burn, did it not?
“She?” Chev queried. The duke had sworn he would never, ever acknowledge Penelope by her title. “Who do you mean by she?”
The duke grunted. “Lady Cheverley. She was not my choice—”
Cheverley snorted. “You made that quite clear.”
The duke pinned him with his gaze. “But she was a good choice.”
“The best choice I made.” Chev swallowed with difficulty. He shook his head no. “If I could—” He stopped before his voice quivered. “If I could go back, I would not have left her, no matter what you threatened. If I could go back, I would make a different choice.”
The duke closed his eyes and laid back into the pillow. “As would I.”
Had his father just acknowledged his wrong?
Violence rose up within him—urgency that lashed every sinew to readiness. Pain, with the metallic taste of blood, flooded his being.
His breath, deep, even, and heavy, coasted over his father’s deadly rattle.
Then, cool pressure settled against his brow—as if his wife were present as an angel, with her hand placed against his head.
Anger had stolen much more from them than his family’s greed.
Cheverley lowered his forehead on the duke’s right shoulder. He laid his wounded arm across the duke’s chest.
Home.
But no. Not quite home, was it?
Home was Pensteague. The great yew bed. Home was Penelope.
And he had yet to reach that shore.
He remained by the duke’s side until he was certain the duke slept. Then, he quietly withdrew.
The sitting room beyond had not changed in thirteen years, if he did not count the musty scent in the air. The last time he had been in this room, he’d agreed to take the naval commission.
In return, the duke had signed papers acknowledging his marriage.
He knelt beside his wife. His clever, loyal, intrepid wife. A wife he did not deserve.
He touched her face.
Her lids fluttered open.
“Oh,” she said, blinking. She lifted her head, gazing into the duke’s bedchamber before sliding her gaze back to Cheverley. “What’s happened?”
“You bid me come and speak with the duke.”
“And you spoke with him?’
He swallowed. “Yes.”
She frowned. “Will you go?”
He hesitated.
“Please don’t,” she whispered.
Quick calculations flitted behind her eyes.
Always planning, his Pen.
“You’ve calmed him. The least I can give you in return is a proper bath. You haven’t had one, have you? Not since you returned home?”
He shook his head no.
The terrible readiness still clenched in his shoulders. His back. His gut. Her cool hand touched his cheek—matching the sensation he’d had before. He allowed himself to be guided.
“A bath would be welcome.” He rubbed his chin. “And, perhaps, a shave.”
“It’s settled then.” She rose. “I will send Mrs. Renton to you.”
Chapter Fifteen
STEAM CURLED UPWARD from the large copper basin full of heated water, beckoning Cheverley like a lady’s crooked finger. He cocked his head, observing the bath as if he were an interloper—a Peeping Tom gazing on something never meant to be his.
He closed his eyes, drifting back to the days when salted sea frothed in every direction. On the ship, the air so thick with salt spray, his skin had become rough as sand. A tub full of fresh, hot water?
Such was luxury. And extravagance. Something beyond his means and his imagination.
Purposely, he called forth the pirate’s whisper.
Tu n’es rien. You are nothing.
He waited, suspended in a heartbeat of silence. Then, his blood surged in response.
He wasn’t nothing. He was Penelope’s husband. He was Thaddeus’s father.
He was—for all his ambivalence—His Grace’s son and his heir.
And, he was Cheverley, no longer captain of the Defiance, but still captain of his fate.
Whatever restraints remained, they existed only in his mind.
He shrugged off his coat—the coat Penelope had made for him. She’d poured care into every stich. Sewing him into his future, leaving him nowhere to hide.
He yanked his shirt over his head and cast it to the side.
He caught his reflection in the mirror—gaunt, lop-sided, mottled by the glass. The external dirt would wash away; the internal, he alone could dissolve.
Had he not earned every sinew, every scar? Did he not deserve the comfort of a god-damned tub?
Fuck the pirate.
Mrs. Renton had heated the water. Penelope had helped carry the buckets brought up from the kitchens into the chamber that connected the duke and duchess’s rooms to the landing of the second floor. He refused to allow any ghosts to exist between himself and this gift.
How many times had he bathed like this as a boy? Unheeding of the effort someone had taken to heat the water, to carry it up the stairs, to fill and prepare the bath. Now, he was aware. Fully aware. Aware of the sacrifice of others, aware of the privileges he possessed.
And, he was aware of the responsibilities connected to those privileges.
He stripped out of his breeches leg by leg, fully naked for the first time since the cave.
Water swished as he stepped into the tub. He braced himself with his left arm and eased into the water. Warmth enveloped him, heat curled the hair at his temples.
Holding his breath, he submerged.
His heavy hair swished as he turned his head from side to side. Sound muffled beneath the water. He stilled in the warmth, as if suspended between everything that had been, and everything he alone could set in motion.
He emerged with a chest-expanding inhale, blinking into the sunlit room as if seeing it for the first time.
Gold. On wall paper.
Everything heavy and dark and expensive.
How could a soul stay strong against such a claiming of wealth and power? Among tokens of authority, how could a man remember he was but a man—flawed, as much prone to injustice
as justice, subject to unpredictable elements without and within?
All men were creatures on the deck of a ship, sorting a hundred choices—significant and not—that could mean destruction or survival.
Against such overwhelming mystery, the best armor was humility.
What was a hero?
He didn’t know.
But one day, he would be duke. If he seized his place. One day soon, if his father’s condition did not improve.
He’d possess unimaginable power, power he could employ entirely differently than his ancestors.
He could lift others up. Make a haven of Ithwick as Pen had made a haven of Pensteague.
Were those the qualities that made a hero?
Stewardship? Care?
He ran a cake of lavender-scented soap along his arms and his legs. The water clouded, and the scent eased tension from his shoulders. His skin tingled as if new.
He leaned back and closed his eyes, taking another deep inhale.
Lavender.
He placed the faint sent that had lingered in Penelope’s hair, enhancing the scent his body remembered. He slid lower into the warmth of the tub.
His wife was remarkable in ways he’d never understood. Loyal. Inventive. Competent. Few men would have been able to create what she’d created out of Pensteague. And, if they had achieved such a feat, fewer still would have risked those accomplishments and taken leave to provide care to a man who had only ever caused her grief.
Where had she found her strength, her fortitude?
He wanted to learn by being by her side.
He wanted to begin, now.
Could he?
He stood up in the tub. Water ran down his sides in rivulets. Cool air, revitalized.
He grabbed the towel from the stand, lifted a leg up against the side of the tub, and began to wipe away the damp.
A knock sounded on the door.
“Yes?” he called.
“Lady Cheverley wished me to bring you clothes, Captain Smith,” Mrs. Renton replied.
He whipped the towel around his lower half. “Come in.”
Since he’d returned to Ithwick and Pensteague, he’d seen the woman who had served at Ithwick since before his birth, but never up close.
Strikingly, she’d changed little.
He skin may have thinned a bit, but she moved with the same brisk efficiency he remembered.
She kept her eyes lowered as she set the clothes on a chair. She turned, froze, and then gasped. Her face drained of color.
He followed her gaze to the ink on his ankle and then cursed silently under his breath.
“Lord Cheverley.” Tears sprang in the old woman’s eyes.
He grabbed a shirt from the pile and pulled the soft linen over his head, expelling a puff of air as the shirt slipped into place.
It wasn’t fashioned like his new shirt—this—this was a shirt from a long time ago.
Thirteen years, to be exact.
“Your lordship.” Mrs. Renton raised her gaze. “I am sorry. I should have known you from the start.”
“I didn’t wish you to.” He hadn’t wished anyone at Ithwick or Pensteague to know him. Ever.
Hurtheven had been right.
He was an ass. An ass who’d been running from the people who loved him.
The people he loved.
Mrs. Renton sounded as if she were struggling to hold back a sob. He sighed and placed his arm about her shoulders.
“I took pains,” he explained, “to make sure no one would guess.”
“Oh, Lord Cheverley, my dear boy, why?”
The crease between her eyes said she didn’t understand—could never understand. And, in truth, he hadn’t any answer that could satisfy.
“When did you return?” she asked. “How long have you been home?”
In a way, but a few, short minutes. Also something beyond his ability to explain.
But even though he couldn’t find words, he couldn’t lie to her—not to the woman who had practically raised him.
“After the wreck, I was imprisoned for six years,” he said. “Several months ago I escaped.” Or, rather, a woman—not the pirate—whose form had been sheathed in darkness had loosened his binds enough for him to finally break free.
“Months?” she said with a heartbreaking sob.
“But please, Mrs. Renton. There is more than you can possibly understand.” He pushed wet hair over his shoulders. “Promise me that you will not tell anyone. Not yet.”
“As you wish, of course.” She sniffed. “But her ladyship deserves to know.”
“Yes,” Penelope spoke from the doorway. “Yes, she does.”
The full weight of Pen’s dark eyes, so large, so full of conflicting emotion, landed like a punch to his gut. This was what he had hoped for and feared—the storm in her gaze, windy, and rainswept, and unnavigable.
But better a storm than no feeling at all.
“Would you leave us, Mrs. Renton?” Cheverley asked.
~~~
Pen didn’t hear Mrs. Renton’s reply.
She leaned against the doorway for support, clutching her basket against her chest.
She’d known the captain was her husband. She’d even accepted Cheverley had his reasons for coming home in disguise. But she had never imagined he’d been back on England’s shores for months.
Months.
And nothing prepared her for the raw reality of gazing on Cheverley’s agonized features free of his filter of lies.
Blood rushed in her ears. Anger met grief, met pain, creating a storm she did not know how to survive.
Then, they were alone.
“Pen—”
“Don’t speak.” She pushed back the swelling internal chaos. “I promised you a bath in exchange for speaking with His Grace. And now, I intend to give you the shave you requested.”
His wary eyes dropped to the towel, soap, brush, and razor in her basket and then returned to her.
“Don’t speak,” she repeated, preemptive warning replaced her command.
She wouldn’t believe anything Cheverley said in this moment.
Months.
What the devil had he been doing?
Her current anger placed at risk all the future moments she’d embraced last night in giddy glee. How had she—even for a moment—been able to overlook the unanswered questions, the inevitable accusations and recriminations?
Then, she looked into his eyes. And his presence filled her with such immense solace she couldn’t speak—the same great solace she’d experienced when he’d first taken her into his arms.
Her pair. Her partner. The mirror image of her heart.
Who’d crushed her when he’d left.
She dragged a wooden chair beside the tub and dropped the basket on the floor.
She was dizzy—so dizzy she nearly claimed the seat. If dizzy could be an adequate description the collision of past and present, of loss and love, of anger and pure, primal relief.
“Just sit.” She indicated the chair. “Please.”
His damp hair appeared darker. The dim light dulled his wrinkles. Like this, it was impossible to believe she had not known him at once.
Then again, perhaps she had.
Hadn’t her breath quickened when she saw him striding across the courtyard? Hadn’t the power of her response drawn his gaze to the window?
“I wish—” he started.
She lifted her brows. “Not now, Chev. Not yet.”
He fell silent and, after a brief hesitation, took the chair.
He leaned back his head and blinked into her eyes. She’d always loved his eyes. Storm-grey. Fathomless. How many nights had she wished she could conjure him back into existence and experience this very expression—a blend of sorrow, apology, hope and—heaven help her—love?
She was lost.
Drowning in his gaze.
She would capitulate, acquiesce. Surrender.
There’d never been anyone else for her but him. There ne
ver would be.
“May I speak now?” he asked.
She considered. “One sentence. One.”
“I wish I had been the one to tell you who I was.”
Foolish clod.
She’d given him one sentence and that was what he’d chosen to say?
“How could you?” She looked away. “How could you believe I did not already know? Do you think I would have let you touch me like you did last night if I did not know who you were?”
“When did you know?” he asked.
She chewed on her bottom lip until it hurt. That pain was easier to bear. “I wasn’t absolutely certain until last night, when I placed my hand in yours.”
She’d felt a spark, an invigoration she’d finally managed to place.
She’d felt the same at the stone circle, but she hadn’t been ready to believe. Or perhaps, certainty had remained elusive because they’d come together by accident, opposed to last night, when Chev had chosen to reach...
But he hadn’t chosen to reveal himself.
He’d played the part of another man.
For months.
“I’m furious with you,” she said.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” She frowned, even now unable to resist his pull. She captured his gaze. “I mean it in this moment. What I’ll say in the next, I cannot be sure.”
He smiled, rueful. “You were always fearless about telling the truth.”
“And you have always embraced deception.”
“No,” he replied. desperate. “Not always. I told you the truth about what I suffered.”
Is that why it’s too late for you and your love?
Yes.
She turned away. His suffering outsized her anger, but still—“When, exactly, did you return?”
His sigh raked her skin.
“December,” he replied.
December. December?
“If you had come home directly, none of this—” She struggled to contain her voice. “You could have prevented Anthony from—”
“I could not have come,” he interrupted. “I told you—when Hurtheven delivered me to the Admiralty, I was immediately court-martialed. But it wasn’t just that. The Admiralty gave me a mission to complete before they’d set me free.”
She’d heard only one word. Hurtheven.
“I see,” she said quietly.
He sent her a doubtful glance. “What do you see?”
His Duchess at Eventide Page 15