“Was specific,” William cut in. “The right title, the right shore, the right hour. Whoever wrote it knew I was in Brighton, knew my habits well enough to know that mentioning my sisters was the one thing that would guarantee I came.” He paused. “That is not a random opportunist, James. That is someone who has been watching. Someone who knows me, or knows enough about me to use what matters to me against me.” He let that sit for a moment. “Someone wanted me on that beach. I don’t know yet what they intended, but I know it wasn’t finished when they left me there. Whatever they wanted, I interrupted it by inconveniently surviving and marrying the woman who found me.”
James stared at him. “You think it’s connected to your business?”
“I think it’s connected to something. I intend to find out what.” William’s voice had not risen, had not changed, but James had known him long enough to hear what was underneath it—the cold anger of a man who was not impulsive and was therefore very difficult to stop once he set his mind to something. “They used my sisters, James. They put their names in that note to get me onto that beach alone in the dark. Whatever else I do or don’t find out, that I will not forgive.”
James held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once.
Silence settled between them. Then James asked in a tone so deliberately different, “Is she beautiful?’
William looked at him.
James’s expression was entirely innocent, which meant nothing at all. “I’m asking as a friend. As someone who cares about your welfare and has a natural interest in the woman who is about to become the Duchess of Blackmoor.” He settled back in his chair. “Is she beautiful?”
William was quiet for a moment. He thought of the drawing room two days ago. The morning light from the window, and Lady Cecily’s particular stillness when she was thinking. “She seems proper,” he allowed. “Reserved. Careful with what she says.”
James’s left eyebrow rose approximately a quarter of an inch. “That is not what I asked.”
“It’s what I’m telling you.”
“William. Is she beautiful? Yes or no.”
William picked up his whisky glass. Set it back down.
“She has blue eyes,” he said, after a moment. “Light brown hair. She is–” He stopped and chose the next word carefully, as though precision mattered here in a way he wasn’t entirely comfortable acknowledging. “She is not the sort of face you notice from across a room. She is the sort of face you look at and then find yourself looking at again, and then again after that, and the third time you can’t quite explain why you keep doing it.”
James stared at him. “That,” he said slowly, “is the most honest answer you have ever given to any question I have asked you in fifteen years of friendship.”
“You wanted details.”
“I wanted a yes or a no.” James’s expression had shifted into something that was not quite a smile, but he was clearly enjoying himself. “And instead you gave me a soliloquy about her face, which is—William, that is not the response of a man who finds a woman merely acceptable.”
“I did not say ‘merely acceptable’.”
“No,” James agreed. “You very much did not.” He picked up his glass. “Perhaps you don’t mind this quite so much as you thought you would.”
“Don’t,” William warned.
“I’m only observing–”
“James.” His tone was level and final. “Don’t.”
James fell quiet, but there was something in his expression—settled and knowing, the expression of a man who had filed a piece of information carefully and had every intention of returning to it—that William did not entirely trust.
He looked away. At the fire. At the unremarkable width of a very well-appointed room.
“It is not a real marriage,” he added, after a moment. Quietly, clearly, as though the clarity of it mattered. As though saying it plainly enough might resolve the slight unsteadiness that had been living somewhere behind his sternum for forty-eight hours. “We have agreed on the terms. She will be my Duchess in name and in public, and for however long the situation requires it. After that, we will both live as we choose.” He paused. “I will keep my distance. I will treat it as a duty and nothing more, because that is what it is, and because the alternative–” He stopped.
James waited.
William looked back at the fire. He thought of his parents. Of the house at Blackmoor as it had been when he was young—large and full of noise that was never the comfortable kind, the particular acoustics of a home where two people who had once loved each other had turned into something unrecognizable and were making sure everyone within earshot knew it.
He thought of his sisters—Isadora at four, sitting on the stairs with her small hands pressed over her ears, and Letitia, too young to understand why she was crying but crying regardless because the house itself was crying.
He thought of the morning his parents’ carriage had not come back, and the afternoon he had stood in the solicitor’s office at nineteen years old and understood, with the cold clarity of a newduke, that he was the only thing standing between his sisters and whatever the world intended for them.
He had made his peace with what that meant. No entanglements. No softness for his own benefit. Nothing that could become the thing his parents’ marriage had become—the jealousy, the cruelty, the love gone rancid and taking everything around it down with it.
He had been very comfortable with that understanding.
