“What if I don’t know the rest?” she asked in a low voice. She shouldn’t ask. She shouldn’t betray anything that wasn’t gratitude that she was to marry this man’s nephew. But she couldn’t help it. Up here on the tower, surrounded by mist, and with only the wind and the house and him, she wanted to be herself. “What if all I can imagine are the ships—the doors—the roads—and not where they take me in the end?”
When he looked at her, she felt young, and also just the right age, and she was shivery and hot, and also steady as the house underneath her feet.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you cannot imagine where they go because you are not on them yet. Perhaps deciding when to go is more important than deciding where.”
He said the last sentence like it was something he’d realized long ago and repeated to himself often. He said it like it was a cherished verse or maxim to live by. He looked away from her then, lost in his own thoughts, and below them in the gardens, Eleanor heard the murmurs of guests taking a walk. And out of the mist came the faint jingle and creak of an approaching carriage, more guests for the wedding.
Her wedding.
Abruptly and terribly, she was ashamed of herself. She’d told herself that she would marry Sloreley, that she’d endure. And the first chance she had, she was expressing a sense of ingratitude and talking about running away.
“Far Hope, though,” she started. She planned on saying something conciliatory and vaguely dishonest to smooth over her earlier confession, but found the words leaving her mouth to be entirely true. “Far Hope seems a place like that. That whatever I imagine waiting for me just beyond the mist, I could also imagine here too. It’s a place of possibility.”
A line appeared between his brows and he turned away. “For some,” he said gruffly.
Then he bowed to her and stalked away. He disappeared through the doorway, taking the spiral stairs down in a storm of bootsteps, and left Eleanor alone on the roof.
It was nonsense to love him—she was too sensible not to know it was nonsense. It had only been a week of knowing him. A meager handful of hours.
Three hours in the drawing room feigning interest in the journeys of their guests.
Six dinners. A moment alone on the tower, in the wind and the mist.
If he were a book, she wouldn’t have had enough time to read him—not even half of him.
And yet.
And yet she felt something awful, a slow clamping in her chest like someone had clipped an artery. Like something inside her would starve and die if she had to be this close to the duke for the rest of their lives and yet be nothing more than a relation to him. Nothing more than a solution to a thorny problem.
She had planned to live without her pride, without her dignity even. She had planned to live without joy or ease.
But to live with this? This restlessness, this hunger that would forever go unfed? This branch of a life as Sloreley’s wife, pruned of all other possibilities? It was unthinkable. It couldn’t be borne. No, she wouldn’t endure it.
The future is still yet unwritten, he’d told her.
The moment she agreed with his words—the moment she thought what if I could still write my future?—she couldn’t unagree with them.
She thought what if I just… left? And then the idea of leaving became its own presence, its own being. Like a shadow, or a pet, it followed her from moment to moment and from room to room. It paced behind her while she ate and crouched at her feet while she made polite conversation in the drawing room.
It curled up next to her while she slept.
It whispered her own words back to her, quietly, urgently, desperately.
What if I just…left?
A week before, she’d dismissed the idea as ridiculous, as dangerous. As foolish as climbing into a hot air balloon. And what had really changed since then? Sloreley was childishly self-centered, but she hadn’t expected any better. His mother and sister were unpleasant, but again, she hadn’t expected much better there either. All that had really changed was that she had fallen in love with the duke.
She tried and tried, but try as she might, she could not untether the two things from one another. The duke and leaving. Leaving and the duke. Maybe it was what he said on the tower; maybe it was because it was he who finally gave her the words to choose something different, something other, but when she thought of leaving, she thought of him, and when she thought of him, she thought of leaving.
It would hurt, leaving someone that made her feel like she’d felt on the tower—young and old and floating and anchored all at once—but it would hurt even more to spend the rest of her life stealing glimpses of him while the rest of her was slowly eaten alive by the Sloreley Project. No, she wouldn’t do it.
Her future would be just beyond the mist after all.
The duke had been right. Once she decided to go, once she decided when to go, the possibilities came like the first flowers of spring—a couple shooting through the earth here and there, and then all of a sudden, there were possibilities everywhere, carpeting her mind and blooming faster than she could pluck them all up.
Jewelry.
A literal dock with many ships.
A godsister in Edinburgh who would help her and keep her visit a secret for as long as she needed to make her final plans.
Truly, it was not so hard to run away as she might have once believed. The answers to her earlier questions about fleeing this wedding—how and where and when—came easily enough once she let go of safety, security, and reason. Once she accepted that whatever waited for her beyond the mist would only be hers if she plunged right in to chase after it.
Pick a time when everyone is drunk and preening.
Pay off everyone who helps you.
Take enough jewelry and petty money to get to Plymouth, where there will be plenty of ways to get to Edinburgh.
She could not even say the choice was hard, looking back at the past few days. She would rather stare into the inky black of a Dartmoor night than into the duke’s magnetic blue eyes. She’d rather face down snakes and bandits and lightning than have to watch the duke’s thighs pull against his tight breeches as he walked and rode and danced.
She would rather bolt into danger than sit in stillness near the object of her desire for the rest of her life.
No, there was no choice, not in the end. The world had had enough of her time, enough of her patience and energy. It would not get an ounce more. Let them all find some new victim to feed the minotaur that was Sloreley.
And her future and her time and her energy would finally, finally be her own. Whatever she did after Edinburgh would be for her and her alone.
Just beyond the mist.
The night was chilly and damp as she walked briskly down the lane leading away from Far Hope. The fog clung to her skirts and her shawl, and her breath puffed out in front of her. She had decided against lighting a lantern until she was much farther away lest she be spotted, and the darkness soon swallowed her whole. The moon was covered by clouds, the lights of Far Hope quickly did nothing, and even after she lit the lantern, she still tripped with nearly every single step. Over puddles, over ruts, over rocks.
Before long, she fell. And fell again.
Her palms were scraped. Her skirts became heavy with wet and mud. She could hear her own breaths like she was trapped in a small room.
She thought of the duke and refused to turn back.
She thought of the duke, and she kept going.
She thought of his words and reminded herself of how it felt to know they were true.
Still unwritten.
And some hours later, when her teeth were chattering and her lantern wouldn’t stay lit in the wind, Eleanor had to admit to herself that she was lost.
Which was when the rain came.
Chapter Three
Ajax Dartham, the Duke of Jarrell and uncle to the world’s worst nephew, had honestly not given Eleanor Vane much thought until she’d arrived at Far Hope. Until then, she’
d been the convenient solution to a most inconvenient problem. He needed someone to straighten Gilbert out—someone who could keep Far Hope running and the dukedom respectable until Gilbert finally settled down and saw to his responsibilities—and she was undeniably that someone, according to every source Jarrell had interrogated on the matter.
God knew he’d waited for this moment long enough. He’d only survived the bleak, miserable years after Helena’s death because he knew he’d be free of the dukedom and this wretched estate when Gilbert reached his majority.
The paperwork was all drawn up; the lawyers ready; the dispensation from the King and the Committee for Privileges all prepared. As soon as Gilbert married, Jarrell would give him a wedding present that Gilbert in no way deserved and hand him the dukedom. Gilbert would be Jarrell. Gilbert would own Far Hope. And Ajax could finally be free.
Free of the memories. Free of the ghosts.
He would retire to the Orkneys maybe, or to the west of Ireland. Or perhaps even Canada, where his isolation could be frozen and utter and complete. He would be alone in body just as he already was in spirit, and perhaps he would eventually find some kind of peace that way. Some kind of relief.
But he could only leave once he’d surrendered the title, and the nightmare of papers, wills, and deeds had all been drawn up with the stipulation of Gilbert’s marriage—something Jarrell had thought would be a foregone conclusion when he’d begun the laborious process of begging the Powers That Be for the right to abdicate the title years ago.
It was very much not a foregone conclusion.
Having been a recluse for the last sixteen years, Jarrell hadn’t seen his nephew for an extremely long time. However, he’d still assumed the occasional tales of Gilbert’s wild behavior that had drifted all the way out to Devonshire had been partially exaggerated. Indeed, Gilbert’s mother had assured Jarrell of it whenever she wrote. Gilbert was a good man, she’d insisted, and had only been caught up in a bad group of friends, or perhaps he’d been mistaken for someone else, or perhaps he’d had a fever and that’s why the malicious gossips had assumed he’d been drunk at Lady So-and-So’s party.
Jarrell knew the wildness of youth all too well, and so he factored in some degree of willful maternal ignorance in her impression of her son, but he also truly hadn’t counted Gilbert’s misbehavior stretching this long. He hadn’t counted on the Italian incident, and he hadn’t counted on Gilbert being so immature. Yet when Jarrell welcomed his nephew to Far Hope that first day, he saw it was exactly what Gilbert was.
Not wild, not spontaneous, nor playful. Not the things that could be coaxed and polished into respectability. No, it was pure and true selfishness, the kind a spoiled child might exhibit.
Yes, Jarrell had definitely not counted on that when he’d made years and years’ worth of painstakingly difficult plans.
More worryingly, he hadn’t counted on the Lady Eleanor Vane.
The Lady Eleanor Vane who was selected because of her competence, her managerial acumen, the patience she displayed with her ailing mother and the never-ending work at Pennard Hall. When Jarrell had first heard of her, he’d pictured some kind of Viking maiden—tall and capable, icy and controlled. A jarl’s daughter fiercely ruling his land until he returned from his raids. A girl like that would be just fine managing Far Hope, even with its burdens, even with its hidden debts to God.
But when she arrived at Far Hope, Jarrell was confronted not with a shield maiden, but with a petite, rosy-cheeked damsel. Though twenty, she barely came up to his chest, and while she was no waif, there was something eminently delicate about her. Her mouth was set not in the determined line of a seasoned administrator, but in the slightly curved frown of someone who’d forgotten how to smile. Her eyes were not iron-dark with rigid authority, but a green that made him think of tender, growing things.
And her manner—soft, gentle, sad—but steady for all that. She reminded him of certain spring blossoms that unfurled with so much bravery and trembling beauty only to be blown away by the wind a week later.
And, somehow, she was the near-heroic daughter that the ton loved to praise? This apple blossom of a young woman? He could hardly credit it—and what’s more, a deep fear began to slither through his belly at the thought of leaving her with Gilbert. At the thought of saddling her with Far Hope and its wicked, if abandoned, legacy. After all, Helena had seemed to him a proper shield maiden once—buxom and ferocious—and then, in the blink of an eye, she’d been gone.
What chance then could this tiny little Eleanor stand?
Finally, on the night of the betrothal ball, Jarrell had to admit some things to himself.
One: Eleanor Vane was made of far sterner stuff than he’d first supposed. Under those sooty lashes flashed eyes of jade resolve, and while the lush fullness of her mouth was often pulled into that subtle, if elegant frown, the words she spoke in her surprisingly throaty voice were never self-pitying or timid. Indeed, she was nothing but serene through the entire week—although he often caught her glancing to the side and swallowing, as if refortifying herself in the face of numbing small talk and Gilbert’s petulance. But other than these small swallows, she was as relentlessly tranquil as usual. She evaded Gilbert’s sulks with ease, she attended patiently to her mother’s many physical complaints in the damp chill of the old stone manor, and she steered her father’s thoughtless remarks into neutral waters. She wasn’t the blossom at all, Jarrell realized, but the tree. One anchored so deeply that nothing seemed to move her. Fixed fast to a landscape with invisible, subterranean strength.
Two: after six restless, fitful nights, after that moment on the tower when he saw something inside of her that so mirrored his own wishes, his own yearnings, Jarrell had to concede that Eleanor awakened something inside him he thought long dead.
It had begun the first night, after he’d banged into the dining room like the brute he was, and she’d raised her eyes to his. That first look she gave him—it wasn’t shy, it wasn’t composed, it wasn’t even curious. It was not the kind of look that a young woman with sweetly upturned features and a chaste demeanor should give.
No, for a brief moment, she had looked at Jarrell like she wanted to know what his skin would feel like against her teeth.
Then she’d glanced away and the moment had evaporated, leaving him to wonder if he’d imagined it entirely.
It was her voice that infected him after that, low and husky, like the voice of a woman still abed, like the voice of a woman who’d just moaned herself hoarse. It fired his blood when he heard it, and for the first time in sixteen years, Jarrell felt a hot glimmer of the man he used to be. Of the man who would have pressed her over the table, pushed up her skirts, and taken his ease right there in front of his guests.
Of course, his guests were not the same kind of guests that used to haunt the halls of Far Hope, and he was no longer that kind of man.
Not to mention that Eleanor was betrothed to his heir.
But it was still strange. To feel, however briefly, as he once had years ago, when he was young and ravenous, and the hidden kingdom he’d inherited seemed like a gift, and not a reminder of what he’d lost.
The next day had brought more small revelations about Eleanor—and these revelations aroused long-dormant hungers inside him.
He noticed her eyes were hued with a darker ring of green encircling the leafy jade of the iris, a color palette he wanted to study in moonlight, noonlight, and candlelight. Eyes he wanted to see dilated in raw, animal longing.
Her eyebrows were a darker shade of gold than her hair, and often raised and lowered in the tiniest amounts, barely noticeable reactions to Gilbert’s pouts or her mother’s complaints about the damp. Once or twice they raised at him, as if she was amused by something he’d said—or that he’d growled, more probably, he had trouble remembering how to behave in polite society after all this time—and it made him want to toss her over his lap for her insouciance and pinken her bottom until she glistened between her leg
s.
And when she returned to dinner without her fichu that night, he could see a freckle on the top curve of a breast, like a sweet waypoint on the topography of her décolletage. A stopping point for traveling lips, a guide for wandering hands.
Was her entire body such a map? Would he find more freckles on her softly curved stomach? A birthmark on the inside of her thigh?
Was her body meant for pilgrims looking to find their way?
If he were a younger man, if she were not betrothed to Gilbert, he would have demanded she undress right there in the dining room. He would demand she wear only her stockings when she was in his presence, so he could look at her whenever he liked. He’d have her sit with her legs spread and her back straight, far enough back from the table that he could see every freckle and mark, so he could see where she was soft and—
Fuck.
No.
No, that wasn’t allowed to him. For a thousand reasons, this young woman and her freckles weren’t allowed to him.
Unfortunately, the following days were no easier—in fact, they were worse.
Much worse.
He wanted to kiss that barely-there frown. He wanted to tousle those artfully pinned curls, and feel her small, curvy body underneath his. He wanted to hear that low voice crackling at the edges with unrestrained lust.
He wanted—oh, this was the most dangerous thing of all—he wanted to tell her about Far Hope, to share the secrets he’d held silently inside himself for sixteen years. He wanted to tell her about the magnificent parties this house had seen, attended by queens and kings and princes of the realm. He wanted to show her the crooked standing stone guarding the entrance to the deep combe which sheltered Far Hope, and he wanted to show her the star-chambered ballroom not as he’d presented it to her earlier, as the single quirk in an otherwise austere home, but as he would have shown an initiate into his family’s mysteries.
Here, he’d tell her. Here is where kings have laid their crowns since the Plantagenets.
Duke I’d Like to F… Page 3