Only, as he remained there alone with his dog and the silence of the house, why did it not feel that way? Why did he find himself wishing he were still across the way with a lady who smiled too much and sang even more?

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

I loved her with all I was . . .

Now it made sense.

Now he made sense.

With his wife’s passing, he’d had his heart shattered.

How could a man, or any person, for that matter, recover from the pain of that loss?

To have found the love of your life, to have known the greatest of happiness, only to have it all wrenched away.

And what had he been left with?

Nosy members of the ton, people like her family, with their noses pressed to the windows, looking for a glimpse of the man . . . treating him like some sort of circus oddity. Was it a wonder he was cold and distant and brooding? What reasons did he have to smile?

Staring at the flames he’d kindled and she’d stoked since last evening, Myrtle absently added another log. Then, picking up the poker, she jabbed at the log, stirring the ashes.

And she watched absently as flames licked at the edges of the wood, turning them black before ultimately consuming it, swallowing it up in a grand blaze that cast the most wonderful heat.

And yet . . . she didn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel it.

Not fully, and not truly.

Not with everything she’d learned about Val last evening.

All she knew was that despite his misery and insistence on wanting to be alone—which she didn’t doubt for a moment—he’d still arrived at her door to start a fire because he’d known she’d be without light and that she’d be cold.

And the generosity of that spirit, Val’s chivalry, offered a glimpse into the man he’d been before. How lucky his wife would have been.

And it was surely a black mark upon Myrtle’s miserable soul that she found herself envying a ghost for having had a man like Val in her life, and for having been so completely and thoroughly loved by him that in her death, he’d ceased to be a man who smiled.

But he deserved that.

Oh, how he did.

Contemplatively setting down the steel rod, Myrtle straightened and headed over to the window overlooking the four corners of the London streets outside her windows.

Her gaze, however, locked on just one place.

Nor was it nosiness or curiosity that compelled her this time. It wasn’t wonderings about her peculiar neighbor.

It was him.

Val Bancroft, the Duke of Aragon—the man.

She hugged her arms around her middle.

What must it be like to have loved so completely, or in the case of his late wife, to have had the love of such a man?