Page 63 of Duke of Diamonds
She found herself softening. Slightly.
“Well,” she said, pushing a morsel of pheasant to one side of her plate, “perhaps we might consider starting with a topic less weighty than household staff.”
A faint quirk of his brow. “Such as?”
“Such as...” She looked around helplessly, then lifted her glass. “Wine. This wine. It is tolerable.”
That earned a small breath of something that might, in dimmer lighting, pass for a chuckle. “A rousing endorsement.”
She sipped again, her lips twitching. “Do not mock me, Isaac. I am attempting small talk.”
“Then by all means, let us discuss the bread next.”
Fiona tilted her head. “It is adequate.”
A beat passed. Fiona leaned back slightly in her chair, studying him.
“I must ask—did something happen?” she said. “To the house, I mean. It looks as though it was left behind mid-renovation... a decade ago.”
Isaac’s knife paused mid-cut.
She watched him from the corner of her eye, but he didn’t answer. Not at once.
Wrong question.
He resumed slicing his meat with a precision far too focused to be natural.
“The manor is as it needs to be,” he said at last.
Fiona blinked at him. “Is it? Because it appears to need walls. And lighting. And, in certain corridors, actual floors.”
Still, no response.
She drew in a breath, then let it go.There it is again. That wall he builds so quickly, so efficiently.
The silence that followed was heavier than before. Not charged, like earlier, but cool. Detached.
They finished the rest of their meal in that hush, each locked within their own silence. And for all the candlelight around them, the room felt dimmer than it had at the start.
When the final dish had been cleared and the footmen excused, Fiona rose with a quiet nod and left the dining room without waiting for him to follow. Her steps echoed softly down thecorridor, past faded tapestries and sconces that gave more shadow than light.
Her chamber was warm when she arrived, the fire already lit, and Miss Jameson standing ready beside the dressing table with her hands folded and her expression impossibly prim. The maid moved forward without a word, and Fiona allowed herself to be unbuttoned, unfastened, untangled from the layers that had clung to her all evening.
The brush whispered through her hair, each stroke counted and careful. Fiona sat perfectly still, watching her reflection without truly seeing it. When her nightgown had been drawn over her shoulders and her slippers removed, Miss Jameson curtsied and slipped silently out of the room.
Fiona climbed into bed, sinking back against the pillows, her fingers drawing idle patterns across the coverlet. Her gaze drifted to the adjoining door. It remained closed.
She waited as the candle burned lower and the fire offered its last few crackles, each sound drawing out the silence until it became a presence all its own. Not even a footstep disturbed the stillness, and when her eyes drifted shut, the weight of the evening pressed against her chest with quiet insistence, like a second blanket she had not asked for.
I ought not to be surprised,the thought settled in, too calm to be angry and too sharp to be ignored.After all, I am a duty. Nothing more. He said as much. Shown it too.
Her body remained beneath the coverlet, but her mind would not still as she stared upward and waited for sleep to claim her.
It never did.
She awoke with a start, though the room was quiet, the fire nothing more than a bed of embers and the light beyond the windows grey with morning. Her limbs were stiff beneath the covers, her body sunk deep into the mattress as though reluctant to rise. For a moment she simply lay there, listening to the silence, a peculiar ache forming somewhere behind her ribs.
It was not sorrow. Not exactly.
