Four years earlier Sophie would not have said that a graveyard was the ideal spot to commence an affair, but she supposed there must have been stranger settings for such developments. Not that she knew from personal experience—one of the wearying things about being a lady of gentle breeding, the daughter of a peer of the realm, et cetera, was that she had always been uninterestingly well-behaved. The June sun cast the quiet, grassy graveyard in dappled shadows, and Sophie felt perspiration bead at the back of her neck beneath the heavy black fabric of her dress; she spared a passing mournful thought for the closet full of fetching summer frocks that would not be worn this year, cast aside for the array of mourning gowns that had appeared in her dressing room within days of Fitz’s death. She was wearing a particularly elaborate hat-and-veil concoction this afternoon and, with a surr eptitious glance around, Sophie lifted the veil to allow a hint of a breeze to waft across her face. It was as she was doing so that she caught sight of a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head sharply; her body seemed to recognize him before her eyes did, some tingle of awareness cre eping up her spine, raising gooseflesh on her arms. She hated that, even after three years, he still had this effect on her. She tilted her head back to take him in: those vivid, arresting eyes; cheekbones that appeared to have been carved by a sculptor. He was clad in the finest of everything, immaculately tailored, boots shined to a gleam. He leaned upon his cane slightly as he gazed down at her. “Lady Fitzwilliam.” “Lord Weston.” His mouth pressed down slightly at the edges at the sound of his title on her lips; he’d told her to call him West on the night they’d met. The use of his title felt strange. “I wished to offer my condolences.” “I—yes. Thank you. I received your note.” The note in question had been written in his own hand, instantly recognizable to her even though it had been years since she’d received any correspondence from him. It had been as formal and stilted as his speech today; she’d read it twice, then filed it carefully away in the drawer in her desk where she k ept the rest of the letters of condolence she’d received, like some grim treasure trove she could revisit whenever she was feeling particularly maudlin.
She felt vaguely disgusted with herself—if this was the effect widowhood was going to have on her, she could not in all honesty recommend the state to anyone else. One would have thought this went without saying, exc ept that Sophie had seen a number of women who seemed suspiciously cheerful after their husbands’ deaths. No doubt those women were not ke eping a drawerful of ghastly souvenirs in their sitting rooms. While she was occupied by these thoughts, an odd, strained silence had fallen. West—no matter what she called him aloud, in her mind he would always be West—looked as though he wasn’t quite certain how to proceed. This was itself a novelty; this was as close to uncomfortable as she’d ever seen him. After another few moments, he said, “I did not come here to seek you out—I wouldn’t wish to intrude on your privacy, whilst you are grieving.” She felt these words like a sharp pinch, as she did every time someone alluded to her supposed grief. And she was grieving—she’d liked Fitz, and they’d rubbed along tolerably together, even though it had become apparent within a month of their marriage how poorly matched they were. But, while she was certainly sorry that he was dead—in battle mere days before the war’s end; the entire thing was a horrible waste—she was also not grieving the way a wife properly should. Perhaps not even the way West himself was—despite the fact that he and Fitz had had precious little to say to each other for the past three years, they had known each other since boyhood, and she was certain that his loss stung. “You are not intruding,” she said, forcing herself to meet his eyes, to let him see whatever he would in hers. “I merely wished to get out of the house, but my maid had a fit at the thought of me going riding in widow’s weeds. This seemed one of the only acc eptable places to go, if I did not wish to be judged for enjoying myself too much.” West flicked a glance around the small churchyard, full of weathered headstones; the one before them was fresh marble. There were no other visitors, merely a collection of headstones and grass spotted with a few persistent wildflowers. “I suppose a graveyard is judged suitably somber,” he said. “Little chance of you lifting your skirts and dancing a jig atop one of the graves, after all.” “I would bet ready money that most graveyards have seen that more than once,” she r eplied, and there was a faint twitching at the corner of his mouth, a ghost that recalled past conversations when she’d had the knack of offering just the right sly retort to slide under that stern exterior and surprise a hint of a smile out of him. “But not from you?” The question was quiet, and there was a trace of uncertainty to it, uncharacteristic from this man who always seemed so terribly certain of everything. Behind the question, she heard all the other, unspoken, questions: Were you happy with him? Do you regret his death? And then, quietest of all: Do you regret your marriage? And she could answer none of these—not honestly, at least. Not with the full truth. Not when there was no point to it, even now.
So instead, she simply said, “No. Not I.” West turned to look at the simple headstone before them, his eyes tracing the freshly carved words: Fitzwilliam Charles Bridewell, 2 February 1787–10 April 1814. Beloved son, brother, and husband. Certainly true on two counts—and true... enough, on the third. Even if it did not feel that way to Sophie, standing in her widow’s weeds, feeling as though she were performing a display of grief that she was not fully experiencing. A silence fell between them, and Sophie felt a small pang of loss for the ease they’d once had—the words that had fallen, eager and quick, tumbling over each other in their rush to spill out of her mouth. She had been so young then; she had not learned to be cautious, to watch what she said—or, rather, she had, but not with him. And he, who had learned that lesson young—too young—had let down his guard with her, and this had made her feel powerful, invincible, as though there were nothing on earth that she could not accomplish. But now, there was too much history between them—a not insignificant amount of it centered on the man whose name they now gazed at, carved into marble. “When we were boys, he told me that he was missing a toe because a she ep bit it off,” West said, breaking the silence. This was so unexpected that it startled a laugh out of Sophie. “You can’t be serious.” “I am. I knew he had to be lying, but I spent weeks trying to catch him without his shoes on so I could check for myself.” Sophie sneaked a glance at him, and saw that his gaze was still fixed on the headstone; in profile, the angles of his face were even more perfectly chiseled than they appeared head-on, and she suppressed a sigh. Men simply should not be allowed to look like this, she thought. “And?” “And eventually I caught him unawares and sat on him until I could tug his shoe off and count his toes for myself.” Sophie could barely imagine the man standing next to her doing such a thing —having ever been so young, so mischievous. “And then,” he added, “my father caught me at it—Fitz was visiting Brook Vale Park on a holiday from Eton—and he thrashed me. Apparently it wasn’t very ducal.” This was uttered in a matter-of-fact tone, but Sophie nearly flinched as if she’d taken a blow. West’s father was the reason she had so much difficulty in imagining a version of West that was so carefree. So young. The Duke of Dovington had done his best to ensure that his firstborn and heir was a carefree boy for as little time as possible, and then had continued to attempt to arrange all the details of his life like chess pieces. Sophie knew this better than anyone, after all.
“All this is to say,” West said, turning to face her directly now, and her breath caught in her throat at the intensity of his gaze, “that for a very long time, he was a good friend of mine, and I’m more sorry than I can say that he is dead.” “Thank you,” she said softly, and—because solitude, apparently, did not suit her, and had addled her head, or at least that was the only explanation she was willing to entertain for the utterly inexplicable thing she did next— She reached out and took his hand. And he went very, very still. His gaze dropped to her hand, engulfed in his larger one. And then his gaze lifted back to hers. And caught. And held. And Sophie was suddenly reminded why she had spent the past three years not allowing herself to so much as glance across a ballroom at him—because once she met his eyes, what happened next was inevitable. Watching a woman brush her hair had never been a particular, specific fantasy of West’s, but he could watch Sophie at her dressing table for the rest of the night, he thought. Quite happily. She was running a silver hairbrush through her long golden waves, wrapped in a luxurious dressing gown that she’d donned over her chemise. He hated seeing her in her black dress—hated the loss it reminded him of; hated the knowledge that she’d be wearing black for another year. He buttoned his waistcoat, his eyes still fixed on the slim hand that moved the brush methodically through the hair that he had mussed with his own fingers not an hour before. Reaching for his coat, he took a breath—uncertainty did not come naturally to him, but he’d never had to ask a woman he wished to marry how he might go about courting her while she was still mourning the husband she’d thrown him over for. He settled on a simple, “How do you wish to proceed?” Sophie’s hand slowed, and she carefully set her brush down on her dressing table. She turned to him with a questioning look. “Very discreetly, obviously.” “Yes,” he said slowly. “But I meant more—are we going to tell anyone? Or just wait until you are out of mourning, and surprise them?” She frowned. “It’s hardly the sort of thing I’d like to confess to my parents over Sunday night dinner.” It was West’s turn to frown. “I thought they might be pleased.” Sophie’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “That their daughter, who was widowed only a couple of months ago, is conducting an affair with the unmarried heir to a dukedom?” West’s frown de epened, uncertain if she was jesting. “No,” he said carefully. “That their daughter is being courted by the unmarried heir to a dukedom—a man she was once rather fond of, if memory serves.” He tried to ke ep the edge out of his voice—something with which he usually had little difficulty—but he didn’t quite manage it. Sophie inhaled a single, sharp breath, and somehow he knew that he was not going to like whatever came next.
“Courting,” she r epeated. “West, you—you can’t court me. This can’t—we can’t—” She waved her hands, seeming at a loss for words—a rarity from a woman who had always, from the very first night he’d met her, when she was only twenty, seemed almost astonishingly self-possessed. “You are a widow now,” he said evenly, and some dark part of him took a petty pleasure in the sight of her slight flinch at the word “widow.” Perhaps it was the same part of him that thought nothing—or, at least, not enough—of taking to bed the widow of a man who’d once been a friend, before he was even cold in his grave. He could add it to the list—considerably longer now than it was a few years earlier—of things with which he had to reckon when he glanced in the mirror each morning. “Once your mourning period is over, there will be nothing standing between us—unless...” He trailed off, unable to continue. Unless this had meant nothing to her—when it had meant everything to him, as everything about her always had. That had always been the trouble; he, who so carefully controlled his emotions where others were concerned, seemed curiously unable to do so with her alone. “That changes nothing of our past,” she said. “That changes nothing about the reasons we could not marry then. Unless your father has recently had a touching change of heart and... well, of his entire philosophy of life?” The words were bitter—not that he could blame her. “I have told you before, and it is still true, that it does not matter to me if my father approves of this match.” He spoke each word very carefully, st epping toward her with slow intent. She rose, even as a flush cr ept up her neck—a sure sign that she was growing angry. “Perhaps it does not matter to you, but it very much matters to me.” “What is the trouble?” he asked, frustrated. “Your sisters are all married—he cannot destroy their prospects anymore. There is no reason we could not wed.” Sophie cut her glance away from him, an odd expression flickering across her face. She did not answer him directly, instead saying, “I thought we’d already been through all this—I thought we could be sensible! There is clearly a lingering...” She faltered briefly, scrabbling for a delicate way to describe the way the very air between them always seemed to come alive the second they set foot in the same room. The way he could barely catch a hint of her perfume before he wanted to press her against the nearest wall, every gentlemanly impulse that usually governed his behavior instantly forgotten. He waited, bitterly amused. “... attraction,” she said carefully after a moment, lifting her chin, “between us, and I thought we could be adults about it—a discreet affair—” He leaned forward. “I do not want, and have not ever wanted, to conduct an affair with you.” She held his eyes, her gaze defiant. “It is all I will ever offer you—because we are never going to marry.” She presented the words like a thrown gauntlet, with color high in her cheeks. He took a st ep back. Turned, very deliberately, and retrieved his cravat from the bedpost where he’d knotted it not so many minutes before, it being put to a far more interesting use than its usual role of guarding
the scandalous few inches of skin at his throat from innocent feminine eyes. Clutched it in his fist. And then turned, slowly, back to her, and said, “Then I do not think we have anything left to discuss.” He offered her the shortest bow that courtesy would allow. “Lady Fitzwilliam.” She crossed her arms across her chest. “Lord Weston.” And then he turned and left her bedroom, descending the back stairs to the kitchen, where he could make his exit unobserved by the prying eyes of the ton. It was only once he’d emerged into the mews behind her house that he allowed himself a single, soft expletive. He slapped his palm, once, against the brick wall before him, allowing his forehead to briefly rest against his forearm, his eyes fluttering shut against the memory of the words he and Sophie had just exchanged. And then he opened his eyes, straightened, placed his hat atop his head, and headed toward the street with slow, measured st eps to hail a hack—the Marquess of Weston once more, the man he was in Sophie’s company tucked carefully away.