Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Emmeline and her father climbed into the carriage in silence. For a while, the sound of the wheels was the only thing between them. Then her father cleared his throat.
“Emmeline.”
She looked up.
He did not meet her eyes at once. “I must ask you something, and I ask it only because… because today has become so muddled that I no longer know which fears are sensible and which are cruel.”
A cold knot formed in her stomach. “What is it?”
His hands twisted together once before he forced them still. “Did anything…untoward happen between you and the Duke of Ironford?”
The words struck like a slap.
Emmeline stared at him. “Papa.”
“I do not mean—”
“No,” she said, and the hurt in her own voice startled her. “Nothing happened. Nothing. Everything I told you was the truth.”
Color rose in his face at once. “Forgive me. I should not have asked it so baldly.”
“No,” she repeated, quieter now but no less firm. “I would not willingly do anything to endanger our future. Surely you know that.”
His expression softened into something deeply sad.
“I do know it,” he said. “That is precisely why I despise that I had to ask.”
The anger slipped out of her almost as quickly as it had risen, leaving only exhaustion and that aching tenderness she had always felt for him beneath everything else.
He reached for her hand then, and this time, when she gave it, she did not resist.
“I have raised a very responsible daughter,” he said softly.
The words should not have hurt. They were praise.
They were love. But they pressed exactly on the bruise of the day, because responsibility had brought her here.
Responsibility had led her to accept Foxdale.
Responsibility had made her swallow every romantic hope she had ever had and call it maturity.
And now she sat in a carriage in her wedding gown, unwanted by one duke and half-promised to another.
“I only hope,” he said, staring at their joined hands rather than at her, “that everything will be all right in the end.”
Emmeline lifted her chin, though the movement cost her something.
“It will,” she said.
He gave her a faint, tired smile, perhaps because he wanted to believe her.
When the silence returned, it felt gentler than before, but her mind would not rest. It kept circling back to the Duke of Ironford.
To the hard line of his face when he promised he would set things right.
To the rough steadiness of his hand when he had helped her from the carriage.
To the impossible, alarming certainty in his voice when he said he would marry her himself.
She ought to have thought of him only as the man whose household had disrupted her life. Only as another stranger onto whom circumstance might force her. But when she closed her eyes, she did not picture danger first.
She pictured his gaze.
And the fact that, for one terrible, foolish moment, standing before him in her wedding silk, she had not felt invisible at all.
“The wedding will not take place today,” Rowan’s voice cut through the chapel yard.
The murmurs died. Guests lingered at the edges—women clutching fans with the sharp hunger for scandal, men watching with the strained silence of those already preparing the evening’s gossip.
Rowan stepped forward another pace, broad shoulders squared.
“I apologize for the inconvenience,” he continued. “Lady Juliet has been taken suddenly unwell, and the matter cannot be helped. I trust your understanding.”
He did not trust their understanding in the slightest. He trusted only the force of his own title and the fact that most people preferred swallowing their hunger for gossip when a duke ordered them to.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then the spell broke. One by one, the guests began to peel away, skirts rustling over the gravel, carriage doors opening, voices dropping into hushed, eager threads that they no longer bothered to hide properly.
Rowan watched them go with his jaw clenched so tightly that the ache had settled into his temples.
He felt Frederick come up beside him at last, but did not look at him immediately.
“Well,” Frederick murmured, adjusting his gloves with theatrical calm, “that went about as well as one might hope when a bride disappears, and another appears in her place.”
Rowan turned his head enough to pin him with a flat look. “You are not amusing.”
“No,” Frederick agreed at once, for once sensible enough not to press. “But I am useful, which is why you continue to tolerate me.”
Rowan exhaled once through his nose, the sound almost a huff, and reached out to clap a hand against Frederick’s shoulder. “You were useful.”
Frederick blinked at the rare praise, then grinned faintly. “I shall have that embroidered on a pillow.”
Rowan would have answered, but a smaller body collided with the side of his coat before the words formed.
“F-Father!”
Aaron had all but skipped across the yard, the solemnity that had been forced upon him earlier now broken into urgent curiosity, his dark hair falling into his eyes.
The boy stopped in front of him and tipped his face upward. “Who was th-that p-pretty lady y-you w-were standing with?”
The question arrived so abruptly that Rowan’s thoughts snagged on it for a heartbeat. Pretty lady. It was an innocent child’s phrase, and yet the words struck too close to the thing Rowan had been trying not to dwell on since he had left Lady Emmeline at the other chapel.
Her beauty lingered on him, even now.
He looked down at his son and made himself answer evenly. “Her name is Lady Emmeline Greene. She is an acquaintance of ours.”
Aaron’s eyes widened with immediate interest. “A-an ac-ac-acquaintance?”
“Yes.”
The boy considered this with grave deliberation that always made him seem at once younger and older than his seven years. “Is sh-she c-coming back?”
Rowan’s shoulders tightened. “No, she is not.”
Aaron’s mouth turned down, though only briefly. “Wh-where is A-Aunt J-Juliet?”
There it was again, the question Rowan was already sick of answering and yet could not entirely resent when it came from the child. He bent slightly, enough that his voice did not have to carry.
“Your aunt has gone on a short trip,” he said. “She will return.”
“When?”
“When she is ready.”
Aaron frowned. “B-but wh-why did she leave on th-the w-wedding d-day?”
Because she panicked. Because she ran. Because I do not know where she is, and I am beginning to suspect I do not know her nearly as well as I once believed.
None of that could be given to a child.
Rowan straightened. “That is enough questions.”
Aaron looked briefly stung, though his curiosity did not quite surrender. “D-did the p-pretty lady g-get l-lost too?”
Before Rowan could shape an answer that would not sound harsher than he intended, Frederick swooped in with almost criminal timing.
“I need your help,” he said, dropping into a crouch before Aaron with exaggerated seriousness. “I require a far more important task than locating lost people now.”
Aaron’s attention shifted at once. “Wh-what task?”
Frederick leaned closer as though confiding state secrets. “I need a man of rare discernment to determine whether the cook at Ironford House truly knows how to make a cake worth eating.”
Aaron’s face lit. “C-cake?”
“Yes, cake,” Frederick said. “A matter of immense consequence.”
Aaron’s eyes darted between the two of them.
“Go,” Rowan gave the smallest nod toward Frederick. “You may assist Frederick in his investigation.”
That was enough. Aaron darted off beside Frederick, already trying to ask three questions at once about layers, icing, and whether cakes differed between London and the country, his stammer thickening with excitement but not slowing him.
Rowan watched them for a moment, and his shoulders loosened a little.
He stood alone for a few breaths.
Juliet was gone. Wellfield was enraged. Aaron was confused.
A full congregation of peers and parasites carrying this tale away in their mouths.
And beneath all of that, annoyingly persistent, the image of a woman in white wedding silk looking at him with anger and shock and something else he had not yet named.
He should have thought of Juliet and her disappearance. Instead, his mind returned to Lady Emmeline.
To the way her fingers had tightened in the folds of her gown when he said he would marry her himself. To the heat that had flared in her gaze before she hid it. To the fact that for one suspended moment she had looked as startled by herself as by him.
He did not like how clearly he remembered it, nor the way his pulse beat harder at the memory.
If Foxdale had any sense, he would repair this quickly.
“You have excellent timing,” Foxdale drawled when Rowan was shown into his study the next afternoon. “I was just leaving the country.”
That much had been plain before Rowan ever crossed the threshold. The drive outside had been full of servants moving trunks, securing traveling cases, shouting instructions to one another with the strained energy of a household uprooted in haste.
John Kirwike, Duke of Foxdale, sat behind his desk with the expression of a man prepared to find the whole scene amusing as long as the inconvenience was happening to someone else.
Foxdale did not rise.
“I have not come to drink with you,” Rowan said.
“So I gathered.” Foxdale took a lazy sip from his glass and studied him with open irritation. “Though I confess the whole matter has become more entertaining since I heard that you were involved.”
Rowan ignored the bait. “You know what happened.”
“Oh, I know enough. Your sister vanished from her wedding, and another bride appeared at the wrong chapel, which caused a stir at the one where she belonged. Charming confusion. The gossip has done most of the work for me.”
“I am not here to discuss gossip.”
“No,” Foxdale said. “You are here to discuss Lady Emmeline Greene, I gather.”
The way he said her name made Rowan’s shoulders go still. “Yes.”