Chapter 5
She asked for it before she had entirely decided why.
“I would like to speak with the Duke alone, please.”
The words were out, and the room reacted immediately and exactly as expected. Her mother’s expression shifted into something cautiously hopeful.
Beatrice, who had been sitting with the patient watchfulness of someone awaiting developments, straightened at once.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Cecily, you cannot—you are already in the papers for precisely this kind of–”
“Beatrice.”
“I mean it. An unchaperoned conversation with the man is the last thing you need when your reputation is already–”
“What reputation?” Cecily cut in. Not bitter, simply a practical observation. “The one that is currently decorating the front pages of three separate newspapers? I think we are somewhat past the point where a conversation in a drawing room represents my greatest threat.”
“That is not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point,” Beatrice said, “is that appearances still matter. They will always matter. And being found alone with him a second time, even here, even now, is the kind of detail that people remember and embroider and–”
“Beatrice.” Their mother’s voice was quiet and final.
Both of them turned.
Beatrice pressed her lips together.
Lady Moreland looked at Cecily for a moment, then at Beatrice, then back at Cecily. “Let them speak.”
Beatrice stared at her. “Mama, you cannot seriously–”
“Her name is already in the papers.” Lady Moreland’s voice was steady, each word placed with care.
“With sufficient detail that anyone who was in Brighton that morning will know exactly who is meant, and by the end of this week, anyone who wasn’t will know as well.
” She rose from her chair. “We are not protecting a reputation, Beatrice. We are attempting to salvage one. Those are different things, and they require different solutions.” She smoothed her skirt with one practiced movement.
“Little more harm can be done by a conversation, and considerably more good may come of it. Come.”
Beatrice stood slowly. She crossed toward the door and paused beside Cecily, close enough to speak quietly.
“If he says anything that offends you,” she muttered under her breath, “even slightly–”
“I will tell you everything,” Cecily said. “I promise.”
Beatrice looked at her for one more moment, then she nodded once and left. Lady Moreland followed without looking back.
The door clicked shut behind them.
The quiet that followed was immediate and different from any quiet that had existed in the room before—the particular silence of two people alone together who had not yet established the terms of being alone together.
Cecily became aware, in the way she had been trying not to become aware all afternoon, of exactly how much space the Duke occupied. Not merely physically, though he was tall enough that the room seemed to have slightly adjusted its proportions around him.
It was something else. The intensity of his attention, perhaps. The way he stood now, without the performance of the proposal, without the audience, and simply looked at her with those green eyes as though he had time and intended to use it.
She clasped her hands in front of her and looked back.
She had spent the last ten minutes in the corner of the room organizing her thoughts with the focused precision of someone who knew they were about to negotiate the terms of their own life and could not afford imprecision. She intended to use them.
“I will marry you,” she agreed.
Something moved in his expression. She pressed on before he could speak.
“But I want to be absolutely clear,” she continued, “about what that means and what it does not mean. Because I suspect you and I may have somewhat different understandings of the word marriage, and I would rather we establish the terms now, plainly, than discover the discrepancy later when it is considerably harder to address.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “By all means.”
“This will be a marriage of convenience.”
She kept her voice even, her eyes on his, refusing to let his composure unsettle hers.
“A practical arrangement, entered into for the protection of my family’s name and for no other reason.
I am not agreeing to it because I wish to be married, and certainly not because I wish to be married to you specifically.
I am agreeing because my mother’s standing and my sister’s happiness matter to me more than my own preferences in this particular moment, and because the alternative–” She paused. “Because the alternative is worse.”
“That is remarkably candid,” he allowed.
“I find candor saves a great deal of time.”
“It does,” he agreed, in a tone that suggested he found this genuinely interesting rather than offensive, which was not the response she had expected and was therefore slightly disorienting. “Continue.”
“I will not be a wife to you in the truest sense of the word. I will not share your rooms. I will perform whatever social duties are required of a duchess—the dinners, the appearances, the necessary pretences—but I will not pretend beyond what the situation demands.” She held his gaze.
“And I will not bear you an heir. That is not a negotiation. That is a condition.”
She waited.
He studied her for a long moment. His green eyes trailed across her face with a thoroughness that was not rude but was extremely, distractingly thorough. She had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling of being read—of having a page turned without her permission.
She kept perfectly still and let him look, because looking away would mean something, and she refused to let it mean anything.
And then, slowly, the corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smirk—or not only a smirk. Something warmer than that, more genuine, and entirely unexpected. It began at the corner of his mouth and moved by degrees until it had reached his eyes.
Its effect on his face was the kind of thing that ought to come with some kind of warning, because it transformed his composure and deliberation into something considerably more… more present. More real.
He laughed.
It was a quiet sound. Low and unhurried, the laugh of a man who had found something genuinely amusing rather than performing the impression of it. She felt it, inconveniently, somewhere in her sternum.
“Lady Cecily,” he said, “we are in perfect agreement.”
She blinked. Of all the responses she had anticipated and prepared for, this was not among them. “I beg your pardon?”
“I have no wish to rush into fatherhood,” he said lightly, easily, with the comfortable candor of a man who had long since stopped pretending his opinions were other than they were.
“I already carry more responsibilities than most men my age would stomach—my sisters, the estate, approximately forty tenants who send me letters about drainage with a frequency I find both touching and exhausting.” The amusement in his eyes grew slightly.
“I’d rather not add an heir to that list until I have substantially more of my life in order.
So that particular concern, at least, you may set entirely aside. ”
Cecily looked at him. “You are serious.”
“Entirely.”
“You truly have no objection to a marriage without–”
“I have no objection to any of your terms,” he said simply.
“I intend to be a husband in name and in public and in whatever legal capacity is required. But beyond that–” He paused, and something moved briefly across his expression, something lighter.
“Beyond that, Lady Cecily, I intend to enjoy my life. So you see, your conditions and my intentions are very neatly aligned.”
She heard it. Enjoy my life.
She knew what that meant. She was not naive, and she was not a child. She understood perfectly well what a man like William Whitmore meant when he spoke of enjoying his life.
Other parties. Other women. The same charming, careless existence he had been living before a Brighton shore had inconveniently complicated things. Simply resumed once she had served her purpose as a reputational shield and they had gone their separate ways.
The thought came with a sharp, hot sensation in her chest that she identified approximately two seconds later as jealousy, which made absolutely no sense, which she was going to ignore completely.
She did not even know this man.
“I see. I am glad we are agreed on that point,” she said, in a voice that was admirably level. “However.” She straightened slightly. “I do have other conditions.”
He inclined his head. “I expected nothing less.”
“You will respect me,” she said. “Not only in private, where there is no audience to observe the absence of it, but also publicly. Visibly. I will not be made to look foolish in front of the same society that is currently discussing me in unflattering terms. I will not be the wife who cannot hold her husband’s attention.
I will not be a punchline, or an afterthought, or the last to know something that everyone else already knows.
” She met his eyes without flinching. “Whatever you were before this arrangement, and whatever you intend to be after it, while we share a roof and a name, you will conduct yourself with discretion. Those are not suggestions. They are requirements.”
He had listened to all of this without interrupting, which she noted and appreciated more than she intended to. When she finished, the amusement in his expression had turned into something more somber.
He was looking at her carefully now, in a way that felt different from before, attentive in a way that had less to do with charm and more to do with something she couldn’t quite name.