“For the summer,” I told him. “I think.”
“You think?” he echoed as he pressed the tip of the unlit cigarette to the smoldering end of the one still in his mouth. His cheeks hollowed slightly as he sucked at the filter, the ember glowing a hotter red, and then, newly lit cigarette between those long, elegant fingers, he offered it to me.
I never much cared for smoking, something that was probably more offensive to my fellow North Carolina blue bloods than all the dead husbands would end up being, so maybe it’s a good thing I was only the tobacco heir’s wife for those few months. But I took the cigarette from him all the same, and had you been alone in that room with him, you would have, too.
“Atlanta is fine and all, but … I’ve missed it here,” I replied, and he snorted slightly at that, smoke puffing from his nostrils.
“You need to see more of the world if you think this mountain is worth missing, sweetheart.”
I should’ve been offended by that, but I was twenty and the most attractive man I’d ever met had just called me sweetheart, so please cut me some slack, darling.
I moved a little closer to him, taking a drag on the cigarette, the flavor rich and bitter. “I’d like to,” I told him. “See more of the world, that is. London. Rome. Paris. Paris, especially, actually.”
“I’ll book the honeymoon now,” he said, teasing, and oh, how that thrilled me. Not just the word “honeymoon,” and all the secret, wonderful things that implied, but the idea that there might be a third door besides Dutiful Daughter and Dutiful Wife. A wife still, yes, but the kind that didn’t throw boring parties or pretend to be excited about Jell-O salads. Wife to a man like this, a man who would take her with him when he went out in the world, who wanted her to experience the same things he did.
A partner.
As I said, darling, I was twenty. Truly my only excuse. Not for believing that such men exist, because they do—I married one eventually—but believing that this man was one of them.
“Maybe you should take me out to dinner first,” I told him, and he ground out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray just behind him on the desk.
“Maybe I will,” he answered, and then threw me a sly glance from the corner of his eye. “Or we could have a picnic. Unless that brings back bad memories.”
It was the first time anyone other than Nelle had ever referenced my kidnapping, and it was yet another thing that, in retrospect, should have offended, but instead just made Duke all the more intriguing, all the more different from anyone else I’d known.
“No bad memories,” I confirmed. “No memories of it at all.”
That was the truth. Other than that odd moment of naming my doll Grace, nothing from that time of my life ever resurfaced, the story continuing to feel like something that might have happened to someone else.
“I remember it,” Duke said, rising to his feet. “Or remember people talking about it, I guess. You were quite the little celebrity for a while.”
“Isn’t it odd how that happens?” I asked, and, seeing his confusion, added, “Celebrity—or notoriety, really—all because of something that happened to you, not something you actually did. Like that poor girl back in the spring, the one whose fiancé fell at the falls. Daddy said her picture was in the paper for weeks.”
I’d been in Atlanta at the time, but news from Tavistock still made its way to me through phone calls and letters from home, and there had been no bigger story than the death of Peter Whalen, a UNC student who’d taken his fiancée, Jill, up to the waterfall deep in the woods a few miles from Ashby House. He’d been leaning down to tie his shoe when he’d slipped on some wet rocks, plunging down to the rocks and water below.
“Never knew why that was such a story,” Duke said with a shrug. “My grandfather had a cousin who took a tumble from those falls back around the turn of the century. It’s a dangerous place, people should be more careful.”
“It wasn’t just that he died,” I said, lowering my voice and stepping a little closer. “They didn’t put it in the papers out of respect for his family, but Daddy heard it from the sheriff himself. Peter Whalen wasn’t dead when he hit the rocks.”
Duke lifted his eyebrows at that, and the clear interest in his gaze made me a little bolder. “He was hurt, very badly from what I understand, and Jill tried to get down to him, but couldn’t. So she left him to go get help. But when she came back with the sheriff and his officers, Peter wasn’t there.”