When a Rogue Meets His Match - Elizabeth Hoyt Page 0,149
ago.”
“And now?”
King’s chest rose and fell beneath her cheek. “Now he’s a duke.”
Adeline played with a button of his shirt, her fingers circling the smooth edge. “I’m glad you have this duke.”
“He’s not my duke.”
“Will you trust me the way you trust your duke?”
King reached over her and drew the coverlet across their bodies. “I am trusting you not to kill me in my sleep,” he said. “I’m trusting you not to steal the Rubens from my wall downstairs. And I’m trusting you not to give Smithers another apoplexy by filching his key again.”
But I don’t trust you with my secrets, Adeline finished for him silently.
“Will you let me come with you to the churchyard tomorrow?” she asked.
“Go to sleep, Adeline,” he whispered, pressing a chaste kiss to the top of her head.
And when Adeline woke the next morning, sunlight pouring through the windows, King was already gone.
Chapter 10
The sun was blinding in its brilliance against the snow.
It wouldn’t last long, King knew, before the newly fallen ground cover surrendered to mangy patches of melted snow and ice. But for now, the churchyard looked a little bit as he imagined heaven might, every surface glistening with an unmarred mantle of dazzling white.
There were a handful of people in the churchyard, including a small knot of mourners who were just now departing from a newly dug grave. Two men who had been sweeping the gravel paths stepped respectfully out of the way, though none of the mourners spared them a second glance.
King walked through the rows of headstones, his boots leaving deep imprints. On some of the stones, the snow had obscured the inscriptions, but that didn’t matter. King came here often. He knew where he was going.
He reached the northwest corner of the churchyard, the collection of Westerleigh headstones arranged in a neat row along the path. At the edge, the familiar stone with its sculpted angel rose from the ground.
Evan Westerleigh
Beloved Son
1785–1798
King knelt on one knee and set the small posy down atop the headstone, the brilliant yellow burst at the center of each flower ringed by white and then an ever-deepening amethyst. Against the snow, they were like a spray of gems.
“Those are lovely,” a voice said behind him. “What are they?”
King rose from where he had knelt, brushing the snow from his trousers. He knew that voice as well as he knew his own. It had delivered him from moments of overwhelming despair and kept hope alive during the nights that would not end.
“Heartsease,” King replied. “In the Renaissance they represented remembrance, memory, and spiritualization. Evan always liked painting them.”
Noah Ellery, the Duke of Ashland, joined him, a yellow hothouse rose twirling gently between his gloved fingers. Both men looked down at the headstone, neither speaking. The clatter of hooves and rattle of wheels echoed outside the churchyard from Jermyn Street and Piccadilly. Nearby, a young boy’s voice rose, peddling the newest edition of a scandal sheet to pedestrians hurrying by.
“I used to love winter,” King said idly, tucking his bare fingers into his sleeves. “I would find Evan on street corners or garden squares trying to paint the city under snow. I’d tease him because he could never quite finish before the snow melted if it was too warm, or his paints froze if it was too cold. At the time, I never understood his need to capture individual moments.” He nudged the snow with the toe of his boot. “Now I wish I could have just one of those moments back.”
The duke was silent, listening with the same quiet intensity King had come to associate with the boy he had been in those first awful years and then later with the man he had become. Incarceration had not broken Ashland. Nor had it changed the inherent goodness that had always dwelled within him. King could not say the same of himself.
“Would we have been friends?” King asked abruptly. “You and I? If we had not been cast into hell together?”
“Why do you ask this now?” The duke touched a thorn on the rose’s stem.
“Of late, I’ve reflected on lost moments, I suppose. Moments where a different choice, a different action, a different twist of fate would have changed everything.”
Ashland looked down, once again turning the rose over in his fingers. “Yet all of those moments are gone. You can remember them or forget them, like them or hate them, but you cannot change them. Only the moments to come can be changed.”