Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
“How do you feel now that the banns have been read a third time?” Margaret asked it casually over the rim of her teacup, but there was nothing light in the way her bright green eyes held Emmeline’s.
Outside, carriage wheels rolled past in a dull rhythm over the street, and the bell above the tea shop door rang now and then as customers came and went.
Everything smelled of tea leaves, sugar, and warm bread, and yet none of it softened the fact that, in only a few days, she would be the Duke of Ironford’s wife.
Emmeline curled her fingers more tightly around the porcelain cup, though the tea had long since cooled enough that it no longer warmed her skin.
“I do not know,” she admitted.
Margaret’s brows lifted. “You must know something.”
Emmeline let out a quiet breath and looked down at the dark surface of her tea.
“I know that it is happening. I know that there is no longer any space left for imagining otherwise.” She gave a faint, humorless smile. “And I know that I have become rather attached to the idea of Aaron.”
That softened Margaret at once.
“Well,” she said, setting down her cup, “that I understand. He is a sweet child.”
“He is more than that.” Emmeline’s voice quieted, turning inward almost before she meant it to. “He is trying so hard all the time. Even when he says very little, one can feel how much he is holding, how carefully he has taught himself to move around his father’s temper and around his own grief.”
Margaret watched her closely now, no trace of teasing left.
“I keep thinking of him in that dining room,” Emmeline continued, her fingers tightening on the cup again. “How his face changed when his eyes filled with pain.”
The memory hit her with fresh force every time it returned. Something in the boy’s frightened instinct had gone straight to her heart. She had felt a small, sharp ache of wanting to protect a child, even though he was not yet hers.
“I think,” she said more slowly, “that I could love him very much.”
Margaret’s expression gentled. “I think you already do.”
Emmeline did not answer that.
Margaret let the silence last only so long before tilting her head. “And the Duke?”
Emmeline looked up at once. The Duke made clarity too difficult.
“What about him?” she asked and hated how evasive it sounded.
Margaret gave her a look so direct that Emmeline almost averted her eyes. “Do not do that. You know perfectly well what about him.”
Emmeline turned her gaze toward the window, where a lady in plum silk was just stepping from a carriage with enough care to suggest she believed the whole street watched her.
“I do not know what to make of him,” she said at last. “One moment he seems…”
She stopped.
Margaret leaned forward. “Seems what?”
Emmeline swallowed. “Strong,” she said quietly. “Decisive. Capable of making the whole room move around him without effort. And then the next moment he is with Aaron, and I see something in him that feels almost like fear, though he would never call it that.”
Margaret was silent, letting her go on.
“He unsettles me,” Emmeline admitted. “I feel… drawn to him, and I do not trust it. He can look at me and say very little, and somehow, I leave the exchange feeling as though I have revealed too much. And then there are times when he touches me, even by accident—” She stopped again, heat climbing under her skin.
Margaret’s eyes sharpened at once. “Yes?”
Emmeline gave a small shake of her head and forced herself onward. “I cannot seem to think properly around him. Not always.”
That, at least, made Margaret smile a little. “Which sounds to me like a man you are drawn to.”
“No,” Emmeline said quickly, and then quieter, “not only that.”
Because that was not the whole of it. If the Duke had merely been handsome, she might have managed the matter better.
It was worse than that. It was the contradictions in him that caught at her.
The man who could defend her in a ballroom without raising his voice.
The man who could make her feel chosen in one moment and almost frozen out in the next. And beneath all of that—
The thought of his late wife returned as it always did now, making breathing difficult under the weight in her chest.
“What if he still loves her?” Emmeline asked before she could soften it.
Margaret blinked. “His wife?”
Emmeline nodded. “I cannot stop wondering it.”
Margaret sat back slightly, considering. “He has never said so.”
“No,” Emmeline replied. “But he speaks of her hardly at all. He cannot bear Aaron speaking of her, and there is something so hard in him when the subject comes near that I do not know what else to think.” Her fingers slid unconsciously over the edge of the teacup.
“A man does not shut a thing away so violently unless it still has power over him.”
Margaret watched her with a seriousness that made Emmeline feel newly exposed.
“And if he does?” Margaret asked softly. “What then?”
The question landed deeper than she wanted it to.
What then?
Then she would marry a man whose body reacted to hers with disturbing clarity and whose eyes could turn dark on her in a ballroom and make her forget where she stood, yet whose heart remained buried elsewhere.
Then she would become duchess, stepmother, mistress of his houses, caretaker of his son, and perhaps never once be truly let in.
Then she would have none of the warmth she had once secretly hoped for.
Emmeline looked down.
“Then I suppose,” she said slowly, “that I shall do what women have always done. Make a life out of whatever portion of it is offered.”
Margaret’s expression twisted with immediate dissatisfaction.
“No,” Margaret said, sharply now. “Do not sit there and speak as though you are being led to execution. You are not marrying Foxdale. You are marrying a man who, for all his faults, has behaved honorably by you at every turn.”
Emmeline let out a breath that trembled more than she wanted it to. “I know that too.”
“Then say what truly troubles you.”
She hesitated, then forced herself to answer.
“What troubles me,” she said, “is that I do not know whether what I feel around him is foolishness or warning.”
Margaret’s eyes softened.
“Perhaps both,” she said gently.
Emmeline almost smiled at that, though there was no real amusement in it. The Duke stirred her in ways she had not expected. Yet the more he stirred her, the more dangerous the question of his late wife became.
Because if she was to feel this much before she had even fully become his, what would happen if she allowed herself to want more and discovered too late that all his tenderness had died with another woman?
The bell above the door rang again.
Margaret glanced toward it first, and the expression on her face changed so quickly that Emmeline turned at once.
Lady Amanda entered the tea shop in pale lilac silk and easy malice, her smile already arranged before she had fully crossed the threshold.
“Well,” she said the moment her eyes landed on Emmeline, “if it is not the future Duchess of Ironford.”
Margaret’s spine straightened like a blade being drawn.
“Lady Amanda,” Emmeline said smoothly, though something in her stomach tightened at once.
Amanda approached their table without invitation and stopped just near enough that retreat would have seemed ruder than staying. Her gaze flicked to Emmeline’s left hand where the engagement ring still gleamed, then back to her face.
“I do hope I am not interrupting anything terribly important.”
Margaret smiled before Emmeline could answer, and that smile was bright enough to be dangerous. “Only kindness, which must naturally seem strange to you.”
Amanda either ignored it or pretended to.
“I was only saying to my cousin yesterday,” she continued, “how remarkable your situation is, Lady Emmeline. So much upheaval in so little time. One does admire your ability to recover from public disappointment so quickly.”
Emmeline felt the strike of it cleanly, but she had expected it. If anything, the expectation made the words easier to bear.
“You are very thoughtful to concern yourself with my recovery,” she said.
Amanda’s smile widened faintly. “One cannot help but be interested when matters unfold so… conspicuously.”
Margaret set down her teacup with a soft click. “And some people cannot help themselves at all.”
“Margaret,” Emmeline murmured.
Amanda’s gaze sharpened. “I only meant that it must be tiring, having one’s private affairs discussed so widely.”
“Yes,” Margaret said sweetly. “You do look exhausted from discussing them.”
Emmeline bit back what might, under weaker control, have become a laugh.
Amanda looked from one to the other and inclined her head just slightly.
“Well. I wish you every happiness, Lady Emmeline.” The words were perfect, but the tone ruined them.
“And I wish you a very pleasant afternoon,” Emmeline replied.
Amanda drifted away again in a cloud of perfume and calculation.
For a moment, Margaret said nothing. Then, “I should like a medal for my restraint.”
Emmeline finally laughed, this time with real feeling in it, though the sound did not last long.
Because even as the brief relief passed through her, the deeper thing remained.
Only five days until she stood beside the Duke of Ironford and gave him her hand before God and witnesses both.
And she still did not know whether, when he looked at her so intently, he was seeing her, or still searching for the ghost of another woman.
“Mind the flowers on the left table. I have no wish to begin married life with dead roses.”
The housekeeper inclined her head at once, though there was the faintest smile at the corner of her mouth. “Of course, Your Grace. And the seating for the wedding breakfast?”
“Keep the older ladies apart if you can. If they are placed together, they will feed on one another before the fish is served.”
That won the briefest flicker of amusement from her before she smoothed it away. “Very good, Your Grace.”
They stood in the morning room at Ironford House, sunlight falling broad and cold through the windows, touching the polished floor and the open lists spread across the table before them. Names, courses, flowers, servants, wines, every practical detail of a day that now stood only days away.
The closer the wedding came, the less these neat arrangements seemed capable of quieting anything in him.
He could decide the shade of ribbons, the number of guests, the timing of carriages, and still wake before dawn with Emmeline in his mind and that same sense of tightened expectation sitting beneath his ribs.
“Will there be cake?”
Aaron’s voice came from somewhere near Rowan’s elbow. His hair had already come loose from the neat part Miss Harrow had imposed on it, and his wooden horse was tucked under one arm as if even wedding discussions could not justify putting it down.
“Yes,” Rowan said.
“What kind?”
“The kind one eats.”
Aaron frowned. “Th-that is n-not an answer.”
The housekeeper lowered her gaze before her smile became visible.
Rowan looked down at his son. “It is the only answer you require.”
Aaron hovered nearer the table, eyes moving over the lists as if he might decipher wedding preparations from the columns alone. “Will there be m-music?”
“Yes.”
“And Lady Emmeline?”
That made something in his chest tighten.
“Yes,” Rowan said more quietly.
Aaron seemed satisfied by that for exactly one second.
“Will A-Aunt Juliet be there too?”
Everything in Rowan went still.
He kept his expression level, though the question landed with the familiar force of a wound touched at the wrong moment. Aaron looked up at him, eyes wide open.
“No,” Rowan said.
Aaron’s face changed at once, the brightness dimming. “Why not?”
“She is not ready to come home yet.”
The boy’s fingers tightened around the wooden horse. “I m-miss her.”
Rowan’s jaw shifted at that sense of never finding the right thing to say to his son. He wanted, with sudden violence, for Juliet to walk through the door and end this particular grief. He didn’t want to see that look on the child’s face.
Instead, he said, “Tell Mrs. Gresham whether you prefer sugared almonds or iced biscuits.”
Aaron blinked, caught off guard by the change.
The housekeeper, bless her, stepped in at once. “For the wedding breakfast, Lord Aaron.”
That was enough to pull the boy after the new thought, though some shadow of Juliet still remained in his eyes as he began, with grave seriousness, to explain that almonds were acceptable but biscuits could be shaped like horses.
The butler appeared in the doorway before Rowan could fully surrender to the relief of the diversion.
“A note for Your Grace.”
Rowan took it without much thought at first. Then he saw the hand.
Juliet.
His fingers tightened instantly and he broke the seal.
Brother,
I hear you are to be married. Accept my congratulations. I have heard only good things about Lady Emmeline. I am sorry I cannot be there to see it. I do not wish to cast any shadow over your happiness by appearing before I am ready. Tell Aaron I miss him. Tell him I think of him often.
J.
For one moment Rowan saw nothing but the shape of the familiar letters. She was in London, close enough to send this and to know. His heart pounded.
He lifted his head sharply. “Who brought this?”
The butler straightened. “It was left on the doorstep, Your Grace. No one was there by the time it was noticed.”
Rowan was already moving.
He reached the front steps in seconds, the morning air striking cold against his face as he scanned the street.
Carriages passed. A flower-seller called from the corner.
Two boys ran by too fast, laughing over some private contest. A lady in gray walked with a maid half a block away.
Nothing. No figure lingering. No messenger. No trace.
“Damn it.”
He stood there only another moment before turning back inside, already thinking ahead, his chest tightening. She was near. Close enough to touch the edges of his life and retreat again.
When he reentered the hall, he saw a footman crossing from the rear passage and stopped him at once.
“You,” Rowan said, handing over the note. “Take this to every stationery shop in London if you must. Match the paper, the cut, the quality. Find where it came from.”
The young man stared at the folded page, then back at Rowan. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“And if anyone asks, the contents are none of their concern. No one reads it. No one repeats a word of it. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Go.”
The footman hurried off at once.
Rowan remained where he was for one long second, staring after him, Juliet’s apology still burning in his mind, Aaron’s small voice beneath it—I miss her—and beyond even that, sharper now than before, the knowledge that his wedding was drawing near…
While one part of his household remained suspended in a wound that refused to close.