“The meeting in Mayfair?” he asked, his tone casual.
“It went well.” Longstaffe’s answer was swift. “Everything’s in place. Pleasant chit like her won’t have any trouble, especially with my aunt’s sponsorship.”
Grimm’s mouth quirked, his gaze glinting with something almost wicked. “Pleasant indeed.”
Dash didn’t press. Not today. But the devilish glimmer in Grimm’s eyes lingered, a burr beneath the skin.
Hawk shifted the air by lifting his cup of tea. “To Sebastian,” he said, voice low but unwavering.
A hush fell round them. The wedding breakfast carried on—china clinking, muted laughter, the scrape of cutlery—but within their small circle, silence held. Each man was caught in the same memory, and yet each bore it differently.
Longstaffe’s gaze dropped to his drink. “He was the best of us that summer,” he murmured.
Blackwell exhaled. “Never to see seven and ten.”
The flash came to Dash unbidden—drunken laughter on a cliffside, the salt stinging his nose, the jolt of steel ringing up his arm as blades clashed. His muscles burned with the effort, yet he and his opponent both grinned like fools, their bravado fed by spirits pilfered from a master’s desk. What had begun in jest had shifted, stroke by stroke, into something harder?—
And then… nothing.
His grip closed tight around the brandy glass.
They had all agreed this was necessary. The only way to keep Lady Hannah from the man circling to take Sebastian’s place—a man whose reputation for cruelty had grown with each passing year.
Dash met each of their gazes in turn, feeling the solid wall they made around him. “To Sebastian,” he said, his voice low.
Five vessels touched in quiet accord.
And although Dash would never shed this burden of guilt, he felt the very faintest easing around his throat.
Following that first toast, Grimm lifted his drink a second time. “To the Duke of Dasborough.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “May God help you and protect you—and may your conscience allow you to take a mistress.”
Dash groused but lifted his glass nonetheless.
He would not.
It was too soon to think of being with any other woman than the one he’d walked out on five days ago.
1825 (TWO YEARS LATER)
Dash dropped a single red rose onto the fresh mound of dirt and stepped back. A headstone would come months from now, once the masons had shaped a monument worthy of a duchess. Such practical matters—such mundane matters—always took time.
Time.
The last two years had been both unbearably slow and far too swift.
Slow in the long days of watching her fight for every breath, seeing the faint tremor in her hands whenever she tried to lift so much as a teacup.
Slow in the nights broken by the sound of her coughing in the adjacent chamber—deep, racking fits that left her pale and exhausted in the morning light.
And yet, too swift in the way she had diminished before his eyes, her frame thinning, her voice growing fainter, as if the world were gently, inexorably drawing her away.
Hannah had been barely twenty when she died. And yet, perhaps for the first time, she was at peace. The pain she had carried for most of her life could finally cease.
No one had expected her to live much longer than she had, though she had found some measure of joy at Dasborough Park before the end. She and Beatrice had become close in their own way—though close was a relative term. His sister was everything Hannah was not: vibrant, willful, with an ever-present taste for rebellion. Yet even Beatrice’s wildness had been gentled in Hannah’s company, as if the frail duchess’s quiet presence called for a softer sort of loyalty.
But Hannah had never truly been his wife. What they’d shared had been a kind of guardianship rather than a marriage, a daily tending of her comfort rather than a union of hearts.
He had not, as Grimm had suggested on his wedding day, ever taken a mistress. Although he and Hannah had shared no romantic feelings for each other, it still hadn’t felt right to for some reason.
