Page 61 of A Bride for the Icy Duke
He reached the door and turned the handle—and nothing happened. When he turned back to her, his face was dark with irritation. “What are you doing?”
“We have some things to discuss, Alexander, and seeing as you are so reluctant to confide in me, I decided to force the matter.”
“I could rip this room apart looking for the key.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. “What do you want from me?”
She wanted a lot of things. A return of the man she had seen so infrequently; for him to trust her with the things in his heart; for him to hold her and touch her and make herhisin that indefinable, intangible, visceral way that onlyhecould.
She wanted her husband!
But all she said was, “I want you to talk.”
“I thought you hated me,” he muttered from across the room.
“Things would be simpler if I did, certainly. And I have not decided to forgive you. All this time, I have been more than understanding—I know there are things in your past you don’t want to tell me. But after Mr. Umbridge humiliatedmein front of everyone, I deserve to know the truth.”
His shoulders tensed still further. “You wish to know about Helena.”
Helena.
She hadn’t heard the name in so, so long, and even the sound of it on his tongue—so familiar, so affectionate—made her stomach squirm with ill-timed jealousy.
“Yes,” she nodded once. “If that is indeed the reason why you are the way you are now.” She leaned forward, holding his gaze as though if she lost it, she would lose everything.
“I want to know why you only agreed to marry me for a single year. Why you did not spend that year with me. Why your hands tremble, and you sometimes look as though you are so ill, you will keel over. Are you fighting an illness I know nothing about?” Her voice broke as she finished, “Are you hiding from me because you are dying and I will lose you?”
Alexander exhaled a harsh laugh, then strode to her. She almost flinched back, but all he did was sit on the bed beside her. “Is that what you think? That I might be dying and never told you?”
“You have told menothing! Is that so unreasonable? Why else would you be so cold to me? Why else would you insist on not marrying me?” It was a fear she had never articulated to herself until that moment, but now that she had, it took over her body entirely, and she began to shake. “Am I going to lose you?” she repeated.
“No.No, Lydia. I am not dying… though sometimes it feels like it.” He grimaced, but whatever usually troubled him didn’t seem to be making an appearance. “That, at least, is not my cross to bear.”
“Then what is it?Why?”
“Can I get you anything before I start? Some hot cocoa? Or—”
“There is nothing I want save for your story,” she told him, and he nodded.
He glanced at the door and sighed. “Then… I suppose I have no choice but to tell you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
At Lydia’s behest, Alexander sat against the pillows beside her, almost touching but not quite as he gathered his thoughts and attempted to school them into some sort of sense.
“As you already know, I grew up here, at Halston Manor—err, York,” he began thoughtfully. “As did another girl, a year or so my junior. Her father was a country gentleman—a baron, perhaps? No one of note, certainly not to my father. But we fell in love.”
Lydia clasped her hands together. “You were young?”
“Yes. I suppose some would say it was an infatuation, and perhaps it was.” Time had rendered that part of himself a mystery; he could hardly have said if it would have died as he grew older, because their love never had a chance to.
“But at the time, we believed it to be real, and for us, it was. I said I would marry her, and all we needed to do was either gain my father’s permission or wait for my majority, at which point I would be at liberty to marry without his blessing.Herfather, you understand, was amenable to the match.”
Her father had always hoped his daughter would marry above her station, and Helena had been sweet enough and beautiful enough that the prospect was an altogether likely one, even without having met him. But Alexander knew that he, as the son of a duke, was more than the ideal candidate.
“But… your father refused the match?” Lydia guessed, bringing him out of his thoughts.
“Yes. Of course he did. My father thought little of me except as his heir, and everything I did needed to act in support of that, as far as he was concerned. A duke would not marry a nobody; he would have an arranged marriage with a lady befitting his station. By defying him, I was revoking my right to be his son, in his eyes.
“He blamed Helena for my disobedience and believed that once I reached my majority, I would no longer wish to marry her. I was nineteen at the time.”
