**Chapter 44: A Dinner Just for the Two of Us**
*I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband*
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I had just stepped out of the bath and was still in my robe, heading toward the dressing room, when I heard an urgent voice outside my door.
"Your Highness! His Highness the Grand Duke is—"
The door opened before the sentence could finish.
"Cedric?"
"Rebecca."
He crossed the room in a few strides and took hold of my shoulders — not roughly, but with the slightly breathless purpose of someone who has been moving fast and hasn't quite stopped yet. His face was flushed, his hair slightly disordered. He looked like a man who had come a long way in a short amount of time, and hadn't thought much about appearances along the way.
"I just heard. Duke Bold came today—"
"How did you—"
"Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?"
He was already looking me over — my face, my hands, the line of my throat — with a focused attention that I couldn't immediately process. His voice, when he spoke again, had dropped to something quieter.
"You must have been frightened. Did you eat? Have you lost strength?"
I stood very still and stared at him.
*Is he... worried?* Not performing worry — not the polite concern of someone meeting a social obligation. Actually worried, in the way of a person who received news they didn't like and came immediately without thinking about it too carefully.
Before I could find a response to this, Mina and the other maids came in from the bathing room and stopped dead.
Then, as though they had rehearsed it, they dropped to their knees.
"Your Highness the Grand Duke — we acted without your orders. We assaulted a member of the nobility. We are deeply sorry—"
"We erased his memories afterward, so there will be no lasting consequences—"
"But he had his hands on Her Highness first—"
The explanations tumbled over each other, each maid talking faster than the last, all of them watching Cedric's face with the wary focus of people who have learned to read that face very carefully.
Cedric looked at them for a long moment.
"I'm disappointed."
The room went very quiet. Even the air seemed to hold itself still.
"Was it truly necessary to erase Duke Bold's memories?"
The maids looked at each other from the corners of their eyes, uncertain how to answer.
Cedric's jaw tightened.
"Did you think I was incapable of handling whatever Duke Bold might say in aristocratic society? That I needed you to clean it up quietly on my behalf?"
"Your Highness, that wasn't—"
"Then you should have handled it *properly.*" His voice was controlled, but the edge in it was real. "Whatever he experienced today — he should have been allowed to remember it. Very clearly. So that he would understand exactly what happens when someone lays hands on my wife within my own walls."
I looked up at Cedric's profile.
The maids were blinking — caught between relief that this apparently wasn't the scolding they'd prepared for, and confusion about what it was instead.
Cedric turned to his aide.
"Lehman. The envelopes."
The aide, who had been standing at a respectful distance with a stack of sealed envelopes, moved to distribute them among the kneeling maids. One each, thick and weighty.
"What is this...?"
"A reward? Why are we being rewarded?"
They turned the envelopes over in their hands with baffled expressions. The aide shook his head very slightly, in the manner of a man who has decided that understanding the logic of his employer is no longer a reasonable life goal.
"Duke Bold's carriage," Cedric said to the aide, "is not to enter these grounds again without express invitation from Her Highness. See to it."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"And as for you." His gaze returned to the maids. "If anything like today happens again — don't erase the memory." A pause, and then, with the patient reasonableness of someone explaining something self-evident: "If you're concerned about the memory causing problems — you could simply ensure there is no one left to remember."
It was delivered in the same tone one might use to suggest an alternate route home. The maids stared at him for half a second, and then broke into the wide, relieved laughter of people who recognize their own language being spoken.
"Yes, Your Highness! We understand completely!"
"We held back today because we weren't sure how you'd take it — but next time—"
"Mt. Makal is very accommodating, Your Highness, very scenic—"
Cedric and his aide both nodded, with the calm satisfaction of a matter properly resolved.
I sat slightly apart from all of this and laughed quietly into my hand.
*I am definitely the only person in this room who finds any of this alarming.*
"I think my intentions are clear," Cedric said. "You can go."
The maids filed out, envelopes in hand, the mood among them now thoroughly buoyant. The aide followed, closing the door behind him.
The room settled into the particular quiet of two people who have just been left alone when neither of them was quite prepared for it.
I spoke first, because I always do when the silence gets uncomfortable.
"You've been to the dark mansion unexpectedly before. Once, I think."
"...Yes. Around the time we decided to divorce."
"I remember. I was coming out of the bath then too." I paused. "You came in and I was—" The memory arrived fully formed. *The robe. Barely tied.* "—ah."
Cedric's ears went slightly pink. He cleared his throat.
"Yes," he said, to a point somewhere above my head.
*Why did I bring that up.* I pressed my lips together and looked at the ceiling briefly.
"Rebecca."
I looked up. His eyes had been on me.
"You must have had quite a shock today." His voice was measured, quiet. "Are you certain you're not hurt? I can send for the physician—"
"No injuries. I'm all right." I held his gaze, then had to look away, because something about the steadiness of it was making me feel oddly transparent. "Thank you for the reward. For the maids."
"They served you well. It would be wrong not to acknowledge it."
"Still." I settled my hands in my lap. "You didn't have to come yourself."
He didn't answer that directly.
We sat for a moment with the quiet between us.
"I should say—" I chose my words with care. "I know this has required a lot of you. The arrangement. Playing the part. You've been more than generous with it."
Cedric looked at me.
"What I mean is—" I pressed on, "—when it's just the two of us, you don't need to continue. There's no audience. It doesn't have to be a burden."
The silence that followed this was longer than I expected.
"Rebecca." His voice was very even. "Do you genuinely believe that everything I do is performance?"
"I—" I stopped. "We made an agreement—"
"I'm aware of the agreement." He leaned back slightly and regarded me with an expression I couldn't classify. "You know, I think you credit me with extraordinary patience. As though I'm willing to go to considerable trouble to maintain a pretense I find exhausting, for an audience that isn't there."
"Isn't that what you're doing?"
"No." He said it simply, without heat. "I'm not, actually."
I looked at him.
"I have demon blood, Rebecca. Not as much as Vincent, but enough. Enough to mean that I don't perform kindness. I don't have the temperament for sustained pretense, and I have very little interest in developing it."
"Then what—"
"It means," he said, "that when I'm here, I'm here because I want to be. When I act with consideration toward you, it's because I want to. These are not difficult concepts."
I turned this over carefully, looking for the catch.
"You want to have dinner with the family tomorrow," I said finally. "It's been a while. I'm sure Bianca would—"
"That's not what I'm asking."
He rose from his chair in an unhurried movement that nonetheless somehow resulted in him being considerably closer than he'd been a moment ago. He looked down at me with those clear, disconcerting eyes.
"I'm asking to have dinner with you. The two of us, tomorrow evening."
"Why?"
"Because I'd like to."
"That's not an explanation."
"I know." The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly. "Is it not enough on its own?"
I looked up at him for a moment, trying to read the expression on his face and finding, as I often did, that it gave away less than I wanted.
I should refuse. It was the sensible thing — to maintain the careful, friendly distance I'd decided on, to not allow things to become complicated when I was so close to having everything arranged.
But I couldn't find a reason to say no that didn't feel, on examination, like something I'd constructed to protect myself from nothing in particular.
"Fine," I said. "Tomorrow."
Something in his expression shifted — a loosening of something held carefully in place. He smiled, properly this time, the kind that moved all the way to his eyes.
"Good." He turned toward the door. "Tomorrow, then."
He paused at the threshold.
"And Rebecca." He didn't look back. "Whatever you've decided about what this is — give it a little time."
Then he was gone.
I sat alone in the quiet room, the lamp burning low, and stared at the door for rather a long time.