“Yes,” Rowan admitted and exhaled immediately. “I think what I feel for her is love. It is unlike anything I have felt before, and it hurts, but the idea of it working out feels so good, it must be love. I love her more than I have the right to. But loving her doesn’t give me the right to cage her. I cannot make her stay if she doesn’t want this life, if she doesn’t want me.”
“But she seemed happy here,” Anthony countered, his brow furrowing. “She didn’t look like a prisoner. She looked like she belonged.”
Brook let out a frustrated, watery huff, crossing his arms over his chest. “Maybe she was just too scared to say it to you! You’re the Duke. You walk around with your eyebrows all bunched up, and you roar at everyone. A lot of people find you fearsome, Father. You probably just scared her away because you’re so... so grumpy.”
A ghost of a sad smile touched Rowan’s lips as he smoothed Daniel’s hair. He thought of Lucy standing her ground in his study, her eyes flashing with fire as she challenged his every decree. He thought of her orchestrating a haunting right under his nose and looking him in the eye while she did it.
“No, Brook,” Rowan murmured, his voice softening. “She was never afraid of me. Not even when she should have been. She was the only person in this world who looked past the title and saw the man, and she wasn’t intimidated by either.”
“Then if she wasn’t scared...” Brook pressed. “... and you love her, why did she get in her carriage, going away from us? You’re a Duke; can’t you just go get her?”
“She blushes,” Rowan added suddenly, his eyes bright with a sudden realization. “Whenever you walked into the library to check on me, she would look down at her papers, but her cheeks would turn the color of the roses in the garden. I saw it. Twice.”
Rowan looked at his oldest son, stunned. The idea felt like a lightning strike in the middle of a winter storm.
“Also, when we talk about you, she only says nice things,” Daniel muffled against Rowan’s chest. “Even when we complain.”
Rowan felt a sudden, sharp jolt of hope, a sensation so unfamiliar it almost felt like pain. He closed his eyes for a brief second, his mind racing.
He paused to think about it. If she were merely a matchmaker finishing a job, she wouldn’t have blushed so much that even his little boys noticed. She wouldn’t have looked at him with that fierce, watery defiance. He realized with a sinking gut that he had played right into her hands. She had offered him a mask of indifference, and he, in his fear of being unwanted, had accepted it as the truth.
He had to find her.
“I made a mistake,” Rowan whispered, the admission finally breaking through his pride. “I think I might have acted too rashly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“All right, that’s enough, ”Lucy’s mother, Marianne’s voice suddenly sliced through the air. She stopped her pacing and fixed Lucy with a look that was uncharacteristically intense. “When were you planning on telling me about the wedding?”
Lucy’s breath hitched in her throat. She looked up, her eyes wide with shock. “The... the wedding?”
The drawing room at the Crampton estate was exactly as Lucy remembered it, smelling faintly of beeswax, dried lavender, and the suffocating weight of expectation. Outside the window, the town was bathed in a soft, mocking gold, but Lucy saw none of it. She sat perched on the edge of a velvet settee, her fingers tracing the fraying hem of her traveling glove.
The silence in the room had been brittle since her arrival a few days ago, but things had taken some sort of turn. Her mother, Marianne, now paced near the fireplace, seemingly restless,while her father sat stiffly with a newspaper he hadn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes.
“Don’t play the coy ingenue with me, Lucy. It doesn’t suit you,” Marianne snapped, though her eyes were shining with a triumphant light Lucy hadn’t seen in years. “I have had enough of this brooding and staring out of windows ever since you arrived. We have waited for days for you to make the formal announcement. When is it to be?”
Lucy felt a cold hollow open up in her stomach. She had expected questions about her business or perhaps the usual subtle jabs about her age and her unfortunate career. She had steeled herself for pity. But this was the opposite. Her parents weren’t looking at her as a failed spinster; they were looking at her as if she had finally, miraculously, become valuable.
“How could you possibly...?” Lucy started, then the realization hit her like a bucket of ice water.
Selina.
“Your aunt sent a letter days ago,” her father added, finally folding his newspaper with a crisp, satisfied sound. “She told us everything. That you had successfully secured the Duke of Langridge, and that a match had been made. Your father and I have been patiently waiting for you to tell us yourself. A duke, Lucy! We had given up hope of you finding a mere baron, and yet you return to us as a future duchess.”
The room seemed to tilt. Lucy finally understood the awkward, expectant energy that had greeted her at the door. They hadn’t been avoiding her out of shame; they had been waiting for her to boast. They were already spending the social capital of a title she would never hold.
“Mama,” Lucy began, her voice trembling. She stood up, her knees feeling dangerously weak. “There has been a misunderstanding. Selina was... she was premature in her writing.”
Marianne’s smile didn’t falter, but her eyes narrowed. “Premature? Lucy, don’t tell me you are having second thoughts. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. The Crampton name hasn’t seen this much prestige in three generations.”
“There will be no wedding,” Lucy said, the words feeling like stones falling into a deep, dark well. “The arrangement has been dissolved. I am not marrying the Duke. I am back because the job is finished, and I am returning to my life.”
The change in the room was instantaneous. The triumphant light in Marianne’s eyes was extinguished, replaced by a familiar, stinging coldness.
“No wedding?” Marianne repeated, her voice dropping into a register of pure, unadulterated disappointment. “You mean to say you had a duke within your grasp...the Duke of Langridge, no less, a man who actually wanted you, and you let him slip away?”
“He didn’t ‘slip away,’ Mama. We decided?—”
