“If she loves you, it won’t feel forced. Right now, she truly thinks she’s doing you a favor. She’s making the decision for the both of you, and that isn’t fair.”
“Not one bit,” Gabriel agreed.
Maggie hovered over me. “We need to make a plan. You need to prepare.”
“I’ll go to Hampshire,” I said. “I’ll meet with her brother first.”
Maggie shook her head. “You’ll rent a room at the inn. Stay apart from her so she knows your aim is not to force things.”
“I’ll help with business around here,” Gabriel offered.
“I can ask my steward to come.” My mind raced with possibility. “But what about the rumors?”
Maggie’s lips turned up. “Let your mother and I take care of the papers. Go and win Georgiana.”
Could I? Would this actually work?
“And for heaven’s sake,” Gabriel muttered, “marry her and secure the heir.”
The afternoon went by in a frenzy of paperwork, beginning with a rushed meeting with my steward and ending with Toole closing the door behind himself in my study.
Only a few tears escaped the man when I agreed to allow him his marriage. He grinned wider than I’d ever seen him in all our years together.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” he said. “You have my word, the marriage will not affect my work nor my dedication here.”
I nodded once. “If I had any reservations on the matter, Toole, I assure you this would be a different conversation entirely. Tell the staff to take the day off to celebrate, when it comes.”
At dinner, Mother and Maggie told me the plan.
Thenewplan.
When, inevitably, the papers wrote about my altercationwith Lord Reynolds, my family would pay the editor to publish an article from a different perspective in the crowd. A nameless friend who’d tell the world that I had loved Georgiana since the moment I’d met her. That ours had been a friendship, and only a friendship, until we’d taken a chance and learned it was far more than either of us could bear to part with.
“Then, with the wedding announcement in the papers, we’ll write, ‘His Grace, the Duke of Marlow, formally apologizes to anyone and everyone he misled in his pursuit of marriage. He did not know, until it was almost too late, that the love of his life had been standing beside him all along.’”
Gabriel took a long swig of his wine, then started to clap. “Brava! I think that that will doverynicely.”
A slow smile turned my lips.
For once, a story in the gossip papers would be entirely true.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
Georgiana
Ten Days Later
Mercutio hadn’t left my side since I’d arrived home. He’d become a verifiable companion. Not just in the barn, but out on walks, now, too.
They say animalsknowwhen something is wrong. Perhaps that was why Mercutio had come to me in the first place. He’d felt how broken I was nearly a year ago. He’d come when I needed him, but he’d otherwise lived his life with his many wives and his tomfoolery.
Now that I had well and truly lost myself, Mercutio had found new purpose. Sometimes he followed me all the way to the door of the dower house, where I now resided. Just a short walk from the big house, but it was my own space where I could spend my days and nights without worrying about interrupting my brother. Peter had the servants dress it up a bit—a bookshelf here, a painting there, my harp, and new rugs for the floors.
I still dined with him and Amelia in the evenings, and I still spent time in the barn, where I now lay on an old wool blanket in the hay. With Mercutio cuddled close against mystomach, and the final few pages ofUdolpholit by dusty beams of afternoon sunlight, I sighed, thinking of Cleo and the library.
Of Lucas.
My favorite memories. I missed him so badly, my chest felt like an aching, open wound, and I had to bite my cheeks to keep the tears from coming.
