Ah, yes. Sebastian’s bittersweet note. “He says that the newspapers are calling me The Daring Duchess.”
Georgiana laughed. “He is correct on that score, anyway. You’re being hailed as a veritable goddess. Your bravery will be the stuff of legends.”
“There was no bravery, only necessity.” She paused, frowning. “Do you mean to say the people who once flayed me alive are now touting my praises?”
“You helped to catch some of the Fenian menace.” Georgiana winked, giving the cat a thorough scratch behind her ears. “Lady Philomena Whiskers likes that, doesn’t she?”
Daisy chuckled in spite of her unsettled emotions, and then she grimaced when her body’s movement pulled at the stitches in her shoulder. “What a ridiculous name for a cat.”
“For some cats, perhaps, but not for this one,” Georgiana said with a grin and raised brows. “She’s descended from feline royalty. Just look at her delicate paws and her sweet, heart-shaped nose. She’s destined to marry a marquis, at the least. No second sons for her.”
The woman was as ridiculous as the names she gave her animal friends. “But inquiring minds do long to know—how does she get along with the mouse family?”
“The Lilliputians, you mean?” Georgiana winked. “Ludlow has been seeing to their care. Lady Philomena Whiskers doesn’t prefer their company. Rather, she wouldprefertheir company, but only if they were obliging enough to be her dinner, and we cannot have that.”
The mere notion of Georgiana’s odd, mountain of a butler caring for a family of mice was just too much. Daisy collapsed into a fit of giggles. “No. You jest.”
The Duchess of Leeds raised an imperious brow. “I assure you, I would never joke about such a thing. You’d have to see it to believe it. But Ludlow does have a heart beating beneath that rigid, scarred hide of his. I swear.”
How refreshing to indulge in laughter. For a brief moment, it distracted her from thoughts of Sebastian. But in the next breath, the pain was there, beating in her heart, for Lilliputians reminded her of the gift he’d once given her.
A favorite for a favorite.
She would never stop loving him. But she needed time, time to find herself. Everything she’d known had been torn asunder, and so many of the people closest to her—Sebastian included—had deceived her. This time of healing was for her body, her mind, and her heart.
Or at least, that was her most fervent hope.
5thJune, 1881
Dearest Daisy,
I have resigned my position, effective immediately. The only position I wish to occupy is that of your husband. When and if you are ready, I await you here. Also, if it is friendship you require, may I offer my services? Given that I’m no longer a covert operative, I fear that gutting the Earl of Bolton may land me in Newgate.
Yours,
Sebastian
She hadn’t answered the first two letters he’d sent her.
Sebastian sat at the desk in his study, and it was still intricately carved and polished smooth. It surface remained organized with the meticulous precision he preferred. Everything was the same. For the familiarity of it, nothing might have changed. His secretary had stacked his most recent correspondence in three neat piles in the upper right quadrant. The lower held his pen. The left held the letters Daisy had sent him, all opened, all read at least half a dozen times.
Her words were windows to her.
He could read them and so easily know what she’d experienced as she’d written them. And so, while all the small pieces of his life ostensibly remained the same, everything had changed.
He had changed.
Griffin had railed against him, begged him not to retire from the League. And he had anyway. His years of service were done. The life he wanted was a life with Daisy. He wanted her back. He wanted their babe. He wanted love and laughter and happiness well into the next bloody century. He wanted to fill Thornsby Hall with children and love and contentment. He would even bring the mongrel.
Hugo, as he was called, wandered about the study, offering a judicious sniff here and there. He’d been sitting by the door for the last half hour, staring Sebastian down, until he’d given up on that game and begun to wander.
He watched the dog sniff, prance to the center of the carpet. “Oh, bloody hell, Hugo. No!”
And raise his leg.
“Damn it.”
Some time and some cleanup efforts later, Sebastian set pen to paper to write Daisy another letter. She had asked for time and space, and he had honored her wishes. But damn it, he was still going to fight for her. And if he had anything to say about it, he was going to win her.
