Chapter 15 #2
His expression hardened. “I do not need advice on taking care of my nephew, either.”
“The boy is lonely.” Sophia stepped closer. “He needs more than a roof over his head and a nursemaid to tend him. He needs you. You are the closest thing he has to a parent now.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Edward’s voice dropped low. “You think I don’t see how he flinches when I enter a room? How he lights up when you visit and shrinks away when I try to speak with him?”
“Then do something about it.” Sophia’s chin lifted. “Stop hiding behind business meetings and boxing matches and soirees. Stop avoiding him the way you have been avoiding me.”
His eyes flashed. “I have not been avoiding you.”
“You have been absent from every visit since the ball.” She stepped closer still, her heart pounding.
“Perhaps I thought it best to maintain some distance.” His voice turned rough. “After what happened.”
“After what happened.” She laughed, though there was no humor in it. “You mean the mistake. The moment of weakness you apologized for so thoroughly.”
They stood too close now. Close enough that she could see the rapid pulse at his throat. Close enough that if she leaned forward, she could press her lips to his jaw.
A child’s shriek of laughter echoed from the water below, and reality crashed back.
What was she doing, standing here, arguing with him?
Sophia stepped back. Edward did the same. They stared at each other, breathing hard, the air between them thick with everything unsaid.
“Bring Oliver to the park.” Sophia’s voice emerged steadier than she felt. “That is my advice. Take it or leave it.”
Edward held her gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded once and walked away, his shoulders rigid, his stride measured.
Sophia watched him rejoin the group of gentlemen. She watched Lord Thornwaite glance between them with knowing eyes. She watched her mother bid them farewell with polite smiles.
Then she turned back to the water and to the families gathered there, with her chest aching with a loneliness she couldn’t name.
Miss Stanton was precisely everything Edward had told himself he wanted.
She stood at the appointed gate with her aunt, a small woman wrapped in so many shawls that she resembled a particularly well-upholstered armchair.
“Your Grace.” She fell into step beside him with natural ease. “I confess I have always preferred the park in the afternoon. The morning crowds are rather relentless.”
“Agreed.” Edward offered his arm. “The Ring path, if you have no objection?”
“Not at all.”
Her aunt shuffled along behind them at a discreet distance, close enough for propriety, far enough to allow conversation.
Edward had arranged for Thornwaite to collect him in an hour, which gave him sufficient time to be agreeable and not a moment longer than necessary.
He was not proud of that calculation, but there it was.
Miss Stanton was easy to talk with. She asked sensible questions about the improvements he was making to the Heatherwell estate, listened with apparent interest, and offered opinions that were neither insipid nor combative.
She laughed when something amused her and did not perform the laugh for his benefit.
She was, in every measurable way, promising.
Miss Stanton was on the list of names I gave you.
Edward’s jaw tightened imperceptibly. He made himself attend to something Miss Stanton was saying about her time in Bath.
“—though my aunt found the waters entirely too cold for her constitution. Didn’t you, Aunt Millicent?”
The elderly woman behind them made a sound that suggested the waters of Bath were a personal affront she had not yet forgiven.
“Mrs. Fenmore is not a devotee of cold water?” Edward asked.
“Aunt Millicent,” Miss Stanton said warmly, “is a devotee of warm fires, strong tea, and strategic complaints. She deploys them with considerable skill.”
“Amelia.” Mrs. Fenmore’s voice was dry as parchment. “You describe me as though I were a general.”
“You are a general, Aunt. I have always thought so.”
The old woman made a sound that might have been a laugh. Edward almost smiled.
Then do something about it.
He dragged his attention back to the path ahead. The afternoon light shifted across the water, and two small boys were shrieking at the ducks near the bank while their nursemaid looked on with resigned patience.
He thought of Oliver. Of the way the boy had stood at the nursery window that morning, watching the street below with that stillness that Edward was beginning to dread. Not the stillness of a contented child. The stillness of a child who had learned to wait.
Lady Sophia had no right to say what she had said.
She had no right to stand there with her chin lifted and her eyes blazing and tell him what the boy needed, as though Edward did not lie awake considering precisely that question.
As though he had not stood outside Oliver’s door a dozen times, hand raised to knock, only to walk away because he could not trust himself to say the right thing.
Because every time he looked at the boy, he saw his brother’s face and felt the weight of everything he had failed to do.
Lady Sophia, in her practical gloves and her too-steady voice, had reduced all of that to stop avoiding him.
Infuriating woman.
“Your Grace?”
He realized Miss Stanton had asked him something. “Forgive me. The sun, I think.” An inadequate explanation, and she was perceptive enough that she probably knew it.
“I was only asking whether you enjoy the park yourself, or whether this is strictly a social obligation.” Her tone held no reproach, only genuine curiosity. “You may say either way because I appreciate honesty.”
He looked at her then, properly. She was watching him with calm brown eyes, and there was nothing in them that required him to perform anything.
“I prefer the Serpentine path,” he said. “The rest of the park is rather too much performance for my taste.”
“Then we should have walked there.” She said it without reproach, a simple observation. “I would have preferred it myself.”
He nodded, and they walked on. Behind them, Mrs. Fenmore muttered something under her breath about the gravel path and the state of her ankles.
Miss Stanton was perfectly suited to be a duchess. Edward knew it. She would manage his house with quiet competence. She would be kind to Oliver. She would never make unreasonable demands on his time or his attention.
She would never corner him at the edge of a crowded park with color high in her cheeks and tell him uncomfortable truths as though she had every right to them.
He watched a father lift a small girl onto his shoulders near the water’s edge. The child grabbed the man’s hair with both fists and shrieked with delight, and the father laughed and spun them both around.
Bring Oliver to the park.
Edward looked away.
“Shall we walk as far as the bridge?” he asked.
“That would be lovely,” Miss Stanton said.
And she was. Lovely and sensible and entirely right for the life he had mapped out for himself.
He offered her his arm and walked on and tried very hard not to think about the ache that had settled behind his ribs since he had walked away from the Serpentine.