With every swing of her shop door, she looked up, hoping he’d come for her. Every night, she peered out her bedroom window into the dark street, hoping to see a shadowy figure flicking a gold coin.
The hard work of setting up the new shop had been her only saving grace. Every night she read and wrote correspondence until the early-morning hours.
She’d begun to include Samantha in more of everything she did, hoping she might one day require the younger woman to take on a larger role because Isobel would be duchess.
But even while she worked herself into exhaustion, she was hounded by a chiding voice inside her head.
You knew.
Youknew.
Why in God’s name would you expect anything different?
Isobel Tinker, aduchess?
The chosen wife of Jason Beckett, the most handsome, clever, strongest, kindest—
He’s a man,she would then say.
Just a man. Like any other man.
And I am a fool.
Of course he’s not coming.
He was never coming.
But at night, when she lay in bed and replayed their time together, she felt the wind on the deck of the brig, the kiss at the river; she remembered his dread of the pirates, his passion in the heated pool. It seemed so real.
And yet.
And yet she awakened every morning alone. She was no one’s duchess; she was nothing to anyone but a friend to Samantha, a travel agent to her clients, and a vexing confusion to her mother.
In truth, she’d invited Georgiana to Hammersmith in part because she’d wanted her mother to bear witness to the moment the duke would come.
How her mother would have been impressed and thrilled by the duke. How happy she would be that Isobel had fallen in love.
Isobel had intended to tell Georgiana everything. In person. No more letters. But then one day turned into the next, and the next, and when no duke appeared, Isobel glossed over that part of the Iceland story. She’d said they’d shared a heated moment on the deck of the brig, but nothing more. She dismissed and deflected every question about him.
Now she would send Georgiana home, and Isobel would be alone in the new building. She would begin to accept that aloneness and the long, terrible reckoning of her shattered heart.
“What of gratuities?” the baron was now asking Isobel, shaking her from another pointless spiral of sadness.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Will the baroness be responsible for tipping staff everywhere she goes?”
Isobel was assuring him that gratuities would be handled by the travel porter when Lady Peyton and her daughters drifted from the watercolors to join the baron at Isobel’s desk.
“Have you begun shopping for your holiday, Lady Peyton?” Isobel asked the baroness.
“Oh yes, and luckily I have my daughters to adviseme. I understand it will be rather hot, and I am so very partial to wool. The girls tell me this will never do.”
“I would listen to your daughters, my lady. I wore exclusively cotton, crisp and light, when I was in Malta, even into dinners.”
She winked at the daughters. “But when may we plan a holiday for you girls? We cannot let the young men have all the fun with their grand tours. I’ve planned several holidays for girls your age. Paris. Rome. Hamburg. A journey like this expands your mind as well as your wardrobe.”
The first girl, a round-faced, large-eyed brunette who remined Isobel of an owl, said, “We do not very much care for travel, Miss Tinker.”
