Chapter 16
“She won’t take it.”
Alastair looked up from the doorway to find Penelope cross-legged on the nursery floor—an image so far removed from the cold propriety of the drawing room the previous evening that he almost didn’t trust it.
Her hair had half-escaped its pins, a loose curl falling across her temple, and she was holding a spoonful of something pale and unappetising toward Rose, who had turned her face away with the regal disdain of a tiny empress refusing tribute.
“She ate the mashed pear this morning without complaint,” Penelope continued, not looking at him.
As though last night had not happened at all.
As though he had not knelt before her and said things no sane man would say to a woman who’d built a fortress out of rules and good sense. “Now she won’t even open her mouth.”
Rose chose that moment to swat the spoon. Pear mush arced through the air and landed on Penelope’s sleeve with a wet, decisive splat.
Alastair pressed his lips together. Hard.
“Don’t you dare laugh,” Penelope warned, still not looking up—though the corner of her mouth twitched.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He entered the nursery and lowered himself to the floor beside her, keeping a careful distance.
The rug was soft beneath him, the room warm from the fire, and Rose regarded him from her nest of blankets with those wide, dark eyes that always seemed to be cataloguing the world with far more intelligence than any infant had a right to possess.
“Hello, little tyrant.” He held out his hand and Rose wrapped her fingers around his thumb with a grip that startled him every time. “I hear you’ve been tormenting your guardian.”
“She’s been impossible all afternoon.” Penelope wiped her sleeve with a cloth, the gesture practised and entirely without vanity. “Lottie says she may be teething.”
“Ah. Well, that explains the warfare.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Rose babbled softly, her fist still locked around his thumb, and the fire crackled behind its grate. Through the window, the last of the evening light was bleeding out of the sky, turning the clouds the colour of bruised peaches.
Neither of them mentioned the drawing room conversation. It sat between them like a piece of furniture they’d both agreed to walk around.
Penelope lifted Rose into her arms, and the child settled against her chest with a sigh so contented it bordered on theatrical. Alastair watched Penelope’s hand move in slow circles across the baby’s back—an absent, practised rhythm. For some reason, he was unable to pull his gaze from them.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, before the sensible part of his brain could intervene.
Her gaze flicked to his, wary. “That depends entirely on what you intend to ask.”
“Nothing dangerous. I promise.” He leaned back against the wall, stretching his legs across the rug. “You told me once that you wanted a quiet life. The countryside, no society, no Season. Did you mean it?”
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she might not answer. Rose’s breathing had begun to slow, her small body growing heavier in Penelope’s arms.
“I meant it,” she said at last. “I’ve always felt.
.. out of step with it all. The balls, the gossip, the endless performance of being seen.
My sisters thrive on it. Hyacinth lives for it.
But I—” She adjusted Rose’s weight, her voice dropping as the baby drifted closer to sleep.
“I wanted a garden. A library. Mornings that belonged to me and no one else.”
The simplicity of it caught him off guard. No grand ambition, no schemes for advancement. Just a garden and a library and silence.
“And now?” he asked.
She looked down at Rose. “Now I have a husband I didn’t choose, a baby I didn’t expect, and an estate that belongs to neither of us. Not exactly the quiet life I’d imagined.”
He deserved that, and he took it without flinching. “For what it’s worth, my imagined future didn’t include midnight feedings and pear mush on my waistcoat either.”
Her mouth curved—just barely. “What did it include?”
“Oh, the usual. Cards. Brandy. Gradually scandalising my way through every ballroom in London until they ran out of ballrooms or I ran out of scandal.” He kept his tone light, the way he always did when something pressed too close to bone. “A spectacularly useless existence, when I think on it.”
“You say that as though you’re joking.”
“Half-joking.” He rubbed his jaw, feeling the scrape of stubble against his palm.
“The truth is rather less amusing. I never wanted what was expected of me. The title, the duty, the endless parade of obligations designed to make a man feel like a performing bear at a country fair. So I did the opposite. Became everything they said I shouldn’t, just to prove I could. ”
Rose’s fingers twitched against Penelope’s collarbone, a tiny reflex of sleep. The nursery had gone dusky and golden, shadows lengthening across the floorboards.
“And did it work?” Penelope asked. “The rebellion?”
“Magnificently. For about a decade.” He met her gaze and the honesty in it cost him more than he’d anticipated.
“Then I found myself in a nursery at dusk, covered in pear mush, talking to a woman who sees through every pretence I’ve ever built.
So I’d say the rebellion has rather spectacularly failed. ”
She didn’t laugh. Didn’t deflect. Simply looked at him with those hazel eyes that stripped every layer of armour he possessed, and he felt the ground beneath him shift.
“You could still leave, you know,” she said quietly. “Go back to London. Resume the cards and the brandy and the scandal. No one would blame you.”
“You would.”
It came out faster than he’d intended—too honest, too bare—and he watched the words land. Her hand stilled on Rose’s back.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” she said, though her voice had dropped to a whisper. “But I would—” She pressed her lips together, catching whatever confession had been forming.
“You would what?”
“Notice,” she finished. “I would notice your absence.”
The fire popped. A log shifted and sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. Alastair held very still, afraid that if he moved, the strange honesty of this moment would scatter like startled birds.
“This is strange, isn’t it?” she said after a long pause. “All of it. This house. This arrangement. The fact that I know how you take your tea and how to make you stop talking, and yet we are—”
“Strangers?”
“Not strangers. That’s what makes it strange.” Rose sighed in her sleep and Penelope pressed her lips to the top of the baby’s head. “I don’t know what we are.”
Neither do I.
The fire had burned low. He should add another log. Should stand, should move, should do anything other than sit here on a nursery floor watching Penelope hold a sleeping child whilst the last daylight caught the loose strands of her hair and turned them to copper.
He didn’t move.
Outside, a wood pigeon called—a low, mournful sound that seemed to belong to the strange suspended world they’d built inside this room.
“Here,” he said instead. “Let me put her down. Your arms must be aching.”
She hesitated—barely a breath—then nodded. He rose to his knees and reached for Rose, and the transfer required closeness. Required her leaning toward him, his hands sliding beneath the warm weight of the baby, their arms crossing and brushing in the narrow space between them.
Rose settled against his chest without waking.
He stood slowly and carried her to the cradle, lowering her with a steadiness his hands did not entirely feel.
When he turned back, Penelope had risen too, rubbing the stiffness from her shoulder, and they were standing far too near to one another in the half-dark nursery.
He could smell lavender. The faint sweetness of the pear she’d been feeding Rose. The clean scent of soap on warm skin.
“Alastair.” His name in her mouth—not Your Grace, not duke—landed somewhere beneath his sternum and stayed.
“Penelope.”
Neither of them moved. The firelight caught the curve of her jaw, the hollow of her throat where her pulse beat visibly.
His hand lifted—he could not have said whether by choice or instinct—and hovered near her cheek without touching.
Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her skin.
Close enough that his fingertips trembled with the effort of not closing that final inch.
Her breath hitched. He watched the small, sharp movement of her chest, the way her lips parted just enough to undo every resolution he’d ever made. Her eyes were enormous in the half-light.
Kiss her.
The thought was a fist closing around his lungs. Not a rake’s calculation, not a practised seduction. Just the blinding, desperate want to close the distance between his mouth and hers and find out whether she tasted the way he’d been imagining for weeks.
Penelope stepped back.
One step. Enough to break the thread that had drawn taut between them, enough to let air rush into the space where warmth had been. Her hand found the edge of the cradle behind her, steadying herself—or holding herself in place.
“We agreed,” she said. Her voice was not quite steady. “Rules. Boundaries. A marriage of convenience and nothing more.”
The words landed like cold water. He let his hand drop.
“Of course.” He manufactured a smile from somewhere—God only knew where, because every part of him was still standing in the space she’d vacated.
“Forgive me. Nurseries at twilight are evidently hazardous to a man’s judgement.
I shall have Pemberton issue a household warning.
Perhaps a placard on the door. Beware: proximity to sleeping infants may cause temporary loss of reason. ”
The joke landed in the space between them and died there. She didn’t laugh. Her fingers were white against the cradle’s edge, and he could see the rapid flutter of her pulse at the base of her throat—a small, involuntary betrayal that told him everything her words refused to.
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
Your Grace. The title sealed the distance between them like a door swinging shut.
“Goodnight, duchess.”
He walked out of the nursery and down the corridor without looking back, his stride measured and unhurried, every inch the careless rake with nothing at stake.
He made it as far as the staircase before he stopped. Pressed his hand flat against the wall. Closed his eyes.
The plaster was cool beneath his palm. Somewhere below, a servant moved through the house, closing shutters for the night. Ordinary sounds. The machinery of a life that had become, without his permission, the only life he wanted.
Something had shifted tonight—some invisible line redrawn in a place neither of them could pretend to ignore. He’d seen it in the way her breath caught. In the pulse hammering at her throat. In the step backward that had cost her just as much as it had cost him.
She’d stepped back because she was afraid.
Not of him.
Of how much she’d wanted to stay.