Page 99 of The Scottish Duke's Deal

So, he stood there, breathing her in, knowing he was about to walk away from the only good thing that had ever looked back.

“Ramsay?” she said softly.

He cleared his throat. “I have to leave.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I have to return to Inverness. Tonight.”

Silence.

Then—

“When are you coming back?”

Ramsay’s chest tightened like a fist closing around his ribs. His spine locked, jaw clenched. He couldn’t look at her and lie, but the truth felt heavier than stone.

“I don’t know.” He said it low. Apologetic. Cowardly.

“You don’t know,” she repeated, breath catching like it might break halfway through. Her eyes sharpened with disbelief. “You don’t know?”

He glanced away. The shadows cast by the lamplight were long now, stretching across the rug like they meant to trap him. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

“I have…” He swallowed. “Private business.”

The words were thick in his throat, rancid with memory. He remembered saying them in a different hallway with a different version of her standing across from him—distant, defiant, untouched. But this Eleanor… this Eleanor had given him her mouth, her care, her trust.

She stared at him, unmoving. Her lips parted then closed again. Her eyes searched his face, trying to find what was missing.

“Private business,” she whispered. “Like… before our wedding.”

“Yes.”

He couldn’t meet her eyes anymore. He dropped his gaze to the carpet, to the faded corner near the skirting board where someone had once spilled wax. It looked darker now.

A silence fell between them—too long, too loud. It rang in his ears like a reckoning.

Then she said, almost too softly?—

“I could come with you.”

His head snapped up. She was standing so still, her arms crossed loosely around her waist as if holding herself together. There was no humor in her face. No lightness. Just a quiet, unbearable truth in her posture, in her open hands, in the barest quiver of her chin.

She was offering. Truly offering. Not as a jest or a dare but as a woman who had already decided she would follow him anywhere.

His hands curled into fists at his sides for what he was about to do.

God, he wanted to say yes. To take her hand and pull her close and tell her it would all be fine. That he wasn’t afraid anymore. That this—she—was the only thing he wanted. But wanting had never been enough. Not for men like him.

“No,” he said it too fast. Too flat. Like slamming a door before someone could see what was inside.

Her brows knit. She stepped closer, bare feet brushing the hem of her dressing gown, that silk robe of hers fluttering slightly with the movement. “No?”

He forced a breath through his nose. His lungs felt too small. “This goes against your rules.”

He tried to say it like it was nothing. Like a logical reminder of boundaries set. But the words scraped his throat on the way out. The hollowness in his chest was cavernous now.

Eleanor flinched, just slightly. A ripple across her spine, the tightening of her jaw. Most wouldn’t have noticed. He did. It nearly undid him.