He had dragged her out to this dreary place insisting he would look after her properly while she recovered, and this was how he showed it…… Frederic finally understood where his priorities should have been.

“Don’t tell me you’ve come to my hometown. Where are you right now?”

He set down the fountain pen he had been holding without a second thought. He pushed the stack of documents to the corner of the desk. He was getting ready to go find his wife.

“No? Why would I go to that backwater. I’m near my own home, obviously.”

Kingsley sounded bewildered.

“Your home would be……”

The new district near the royal palace.

She went all the way there without telling me?

“Didn’t you know? The duchess had someone with her.”

“Someone? Who.”

“Oh? Ah…… well.”

The voice asking who was sharp. Kingsley had never heard Frederic sound like that, and he couldn’t help flinching.

“What was the name again. Your maternal cousin among the princes, the youngest……”

“Julian Windsor?”

“Ah, yes. Him. The two of them were strolling along the shopping street.”

“Ha.”

She said she was too upset to go shopping with me and told me to turn the car around immediately, but she was perfectly happy to browse shops with Julian. All the way to the capital. Just. The. Two. Of. Them.

“Frederic. Does the duchess have a habit of collecting secondhand items?”

Kingsley asked carefully into the silence.

“What kind of absurd notion is that.”

Beautiful things, extravagant things, expensive things, precious things, and above all only brand-new things that had never passed through another person’s hands, that was his precious wife. His wife, buying secondhand? Out of the question.

Frederic answered sharply.

“Right? The daughter of the wealthiest family in the kingdom, at a secondhand shop. That makes no sense.”

“A secondhand shop?”

“She was in quite the lengthy argument with the shop owner. Saying she knew something had been purchased there, that it had an engraved initial so trying to sell it anywhere else would hurt its value because of the specific marking, that she didn’t care what price they named…… I couldn’t tell if she was trying to buy or sell something, but she was practically begging, completely forgetting herself as a duchess……”

“……!”

The sound of four horses’ hooves rang out powerfully beyond the study window just then. Margie, who he hadn’t even known had gone out, seemed to have just returned.

Frederic dropped the receiver with Kingsley still talking and ran outside. Before the servants could attend to their returning mistress, he shouldered past them and wrenched the carriage door open in a hurry, only to find……

“……?”

Duke Frederic Graham was a thoroughly pragmatic man who had never in his life indulged in absurd imaginings. And yet the scene before him.

Margie’s left hand gripped Julian’s collar, and her right palm was pressed flat over his lips, so their faces were pressed close together. Like……

“Frederic?”

Like lovers on the verge of a kiss.

“Well.”

Look at this.

A thick vein rose and twitched across Frederic’s brow.

“……Get down, darling.”

The sight was provocative enough to fuel any number of scandalous interpretations. He lost his composure entirely and scooped her slight body into his arms.

“Oh!”

Her light, airy frame lifted off the ground, and a single sharp cry rang out like a bird’s call.

“What are you doing, Frederic! In front of His Highness, have some dignity……”

“Dignity? Do I look like I have room to think about that right now?”

My wife was about to kiss another man, for God’s sake!

Frederic snapped at Margie, who was flailing her arms and legs in his grip. Even so, he pulled her tighter against him to make sure she wouldn’t fall.

“Put me down! Please! I’m begging you!”

“Fine. Since you want it so badly.”

Thump!

“Oh!”

Her slight body landed softly on a sleek leather sofa.

The room they had entered was Frederic’s study.

It was a space he normally kept strictly off-limits to others, and that included his wife Margie.

She had finally been allowed into the place he had kept so carefully closed, though not quite in the way she had imagined……

“I’ll give you what you want. Whatever my wife wants.”

“Fr, Frederic!”

Getting to experience this room while pinned beneath my husband. I’ll take it.

“So. Did you enjoy your shopping? Ah. Was it a date, not shopping.”

Frederic looked down at her, quiet and cold.

“A date. It’s a misunderstanding, I was only……”

“Did His Highness win your favor by offering his castles and lands, his inexhaustible pension, and the noble name Windsor to pass on to his heirs?”

“Frederic, why would you say something like……”

“Sir Flynn may well be delighted. Windsor would be a more advantageous name than Graham for entering political life, after all.”

The voice was low and measured. But Margie knew perfectly well it was sharper and angrier than she had ever heard it.

“That’s not……”

“Then tell me.”

Frederic cut her off and bit down on his jaw, the line of it casting a hard shadow.

“Why did you go out with another man. Without telling your husband. That far. Just the two of you.”

“Frederic, that……”

“Do you regret marrying me, Margie Graham?”

The composure he had maintained throughout cracked, and he raised his voice without restraint.

“Am I an embarrassment? Am I pathetic, with my poor taste, unable to pick out the right jewels for my wife’s complexion or the right hairpins for her dark hair?”

Seeing the hysteria in her husband’s eyes, Margie found herself in a dilemma.

To clear up his dreadful misunderstanding, which was less a misunderstanding and more a raw wound of inferiority, all she had to do was tell him: I went all that way to buy back the wristwatch you sold for next to nothing.

But if she said that, the amnesia act would be exposed, and on top of that……

‘If I could, I would undo that day. I want to go back to when she and I were strangers.’

Frederic, seizing the moment, would immediately shove divorce papers in her face and press her to sign them on the spot……!

“And what about you, Frederic!”

D*mn it, he would go running off to his true love, that name she couldn’t bear to say, Princess Steinhaur, all the way to the Scotrian Empire! No! Never!

“No matter what I say, you’re going to leave for the woman you love!”

Margie’s voice broke, and Frederic’s handsome brow creased for a moment.

Even making that face, he’s still impossibly beautiful. Unbelievable……

“Ugh……”

His anguished expression was so devastating she nearly kissed him on the spot.

“What good is your answer! Whatever I say, you’ll do what you want! You’ll leave me behind and go to Scotria!”

She barely held back the urge and shoved hard against his solid chest, crying out.

The force that came out of that slight frame was remarkable. Caught off guard by her grip, Frederic was pushed back and landed awkwardly on the floor.

“You never loved me to begin with. You never treated me like a wife. And on top of that……”

Never shared a bed with me once, not until I lost my memory.

Swallowing those words back down tightened her throat and brought tears to her eyes. Even so, she was frightened he might have heard her muttering and quickly pressed her lips together.

It was the first time Margie understood it. Loving someone too much makes you a coward. You’re terrified of losing them, of hurting them, and yet……

“You came to my debutante and then pretended you hadn’t! What on earth is that supposed to mean!”

At the same time, it makes you terrifyingly reckless.

“How do you know……”

“Why did you hide it! Why!”

“That was……”

“Was it that shameful? That the distinguished Duke Graham attended a miser Flynn’s party?”

“It wasn’t like that, I……”

“Then what was it? That a merchant’s daughter with no breeding wasn’t worth telling something like that to?”

“Margie.”

“When I get my memory back, Frederic, you’ll……”

Margie paused her ragged, uneven breathing and bit her lower lip with her front teeth.

“Leave me forever!”

Then she screamed like a child.

“That’s why you sold it to a fence! The leather strap moonphase wristwatch I gave you as a gift!”

“……!”

“Because you’re going to leave without a second thought, and a gift that carries my feelings means absolutely nothing to you!”

“……”

“Even so! Selling it to a swindler who doesn’t know what he’s looking at, for next to nothing, wasn’t enough, you had to throw it away on cards too!”

“Oh no.”

The moment he heard the word watch from her, Frederic’s eyes went cold and still.

“You didn’t……. actually lose your memory?”

The quiet lament in his voice, thick with grievance and resignation, dropped very low.

“You deceived everyone…… Margie. Your physician. Sir Flynn, your father and my father-in-law. Me, your husband. Perfectly enough that no one suspected a thing.”

Frederic swept his tangled golden hair back from his forehead and pressed his jaw tight.

Margie could swear to it. The green of his eyes in that moment was the coldest, most reproachful shade of green she had ever seen in her life.