Page 82 of A Bride for the Icy Duke
Alexander barely spared it a glance, his patience fraying. “Not now, Harrogate. My wife is missing. I don't have time for—”
His eyes fell on the portrait for a second, and his world stopped.
The girl in the portrait couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen. She sat in a garden chair, her posture stiff with the self-consciousness of youth. Her copper hair was pulled back, but several rebellious curls had escaped to frame her face. And her eyes—those hazel eyes that shifted between green and brown depending on the light—stared out at him with an expression that was both despairing yet hopeful.
Ever since returning to York, something about those eyes had struck him asfamiliar…
Now, he recognized those eyes at once.
Alexander's hands began to shake. Not from the laudanum withdrawal that had plagued him for so long, but from something else entirely. Recognition, sharp and undeniable, pierced through him.
“Lydia, darling! Get back here!”
A girl, running through woodland at dusk, tears streaming down her face.
“What are you doing, miss?”
He saw her now as she had once been… so small, so frightened, standing waist-deep in freezing water with death in her eyes. The way she had shuddered when he pulled her from the pond. The desperate grip of her hands on his coat. The trust she had placed in two strangers who had promised her everything would be well…
“We shall contrive together,” a man's voice—her father's voice—had echoed through the trees as they led her home. “Just the two of us. You'll see.”
But her father was dead.
Dead because of him.
The portrait slipped from nerveless fingers. Lady Harrogate caught it with a gasp, but Alexander barely registered the sound. His vision tunneled, the edges of the world going dark.
All this time.
All this time, she had been that girl.
The one he'd saved. The one whose anguish had moved him so deeply he'd thought of her often in the years that followed, hoping she'd found the happiness he'd promised. The girl whose grief had reminded him, even in the depths of his own sorrow over Helena, that others suffered too.
And he had married her. Married her and abandoned her. Married her, not knowing—notseeing—that she was the same girl who had already trusted him once before. Who had looked up at him with those enormous eyes and believed him when he said everything would be well.
“…Your Grace?” Lady Harrogate's voice seemed to come from very far away. “Are you quite all right?”
He'd failed her. Not once, but twice. First by being the reason her father died. And second by not recognizing her, by not remembering the promise he'd made to a frightened child in the dark.
“You'll see…” her father had said.
But Alexander hadn't seen. Hadn't seen anything.
“Your Grace!” Lady Harrogate's hand on his arm finally broke through his stupor. “You have gone quite pale. Should I fetch the doctor?”
Alexander sucked in a breath, his lungs burning as though he'd been underwater. His mind struggled to reconcile past and present, the threads of his life suddenly weaving together in a pattern he'd been too blind to see.
She had trusted him then. Had she married him now because of that trust? Because some part of her remembered the boy whohad pulled her from the water and held her until she stopped shaking?
The irony was viciously sharp. She had placed her faith in him because he'd once saved her life. And he had repaid that faith by abandoning her to a life of loneliness.
“The pond,” he gasped, the realization hitting him like a physical blow. His head snapped up, wild eyes meeting Lady Harrogate's confused gaze. “Dear God. She has gone to the pond.”
“What pond? Your Grace, I don't understand—”
But Alexander was already moving, shoving the portrait back into Harrogate's hands and striding toward the door. His heart hammered against his ribs, terror lending speed to his steps.
The place where they'd first met. The place where she'd once stood in freezing water, contemplating an escape from unbearable pain.
