“The alternative,” he said finally, “is not something I intend to allow.”
James looked at him for a long moment. And then, with the wisdom of a man who knew exactly when to press and when to let something lie, he picked up his glass and said nothing further.
The fire settled in the grate.
Outside, London continued in its usual self-important fashion, entirely indifferent to the fact that the Duke of Blackmoor was sitting in a leather chair in the Marlborough Club, telling himself, with great conviction and considerable effort, that Thursday was just a date and a marriage was just a word and Lady Cecily’s blue eyes were absolutely, definitively, not something he intended to think about again.
He almost convinced himself.
CHAPTER 7
“Hold still,” Margaret said. “You’re strangling the ribbon.”
Cecily looked down. She was, in fact, holding the ivory ribbon with the tight grip of someone who had forgotten they were holding it and had been thinking about something else entirely for the past twenty minutes. She released it.
Margaret took the ribbon gently from her hands and began tying it herself, with the serene competence of a woman who had long since accepted that if something needed doing, it was generally faster to simply do it. She did not comment on the twenty minutes.
This was one of the things Cecily had always loved most about her.
Margaret Duncaster, the Duchess of Ravenscourt—Cecily had never once in her life managed to think of her that way—washer cousin, the girl she had grown up alongside in the same nursery and the same schoolroom and the same summers at their grandmother’s house in Wiltshire.
She had married Sebastian Duncaster, Edward’s closest friend, in what had been at the time the most dramatic wedding the family had produced. Until now, apparently.
The dress was laid out on the bed. Ivory silk, hastily commissioned, beautifully made by a modiste who had understood the assignment—elegant, simple, appropriate for a wedding that was not precisely a celebration and therefore could not dress itself as one.
It was a perfectly lovely dress. Cecily looked at it with conflicting feelings.
“Three days,” she murmured.
“Yes,” Beatrice said, from the chair by the window, where she was nominally attending to correspondence and was in practice watching her sister with focused concern.
“Three days,” Cecily said again. “I am to be married in three days.”
“You are.” Beatrice set down her pen. “How are you feeling?”
“I am feeling,” Cecily said carefully, “that three days is not a great deal of time.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is not the time one requires to—to adjust to the idea of marriage. To make one’s peace with it. To–” She looked at the dress. “I always imagined I would have a morning, at least. A morning to sit with it quietly before everything began. To feel whatever a bride is supposed to feel.”
“What is a bride supposed to feel?” Margaret asked, still working the ribbon with calm precision.
“Happy,” Cecily said. “Or nervous in a happy way. Not nervous in a—in athis-is-happening-too-fast-and-I-have-not-consented-to-the-paceway.” She sat back in her chair. “I am getting married in three days to a man I have spoken to twice. Once while he was concussed, and once while I was trying not to cry. Neither of those conversations constitutes a solid foundation for a lifetime’s acquaintance.”
“It doesn’t need to be a lifetime,” Beatrice argued, with the particular gentleness of someone choosing their words with care. “You said so yourself.”
“I know what I said.” Cecily looked at the window. “That doesn’t make standing in a church in three days feel less permanent.”
Margaret tied off the ribbon, examined it, decided she was satisfied, and then looked up. “When Sebastian and I married, I was not at all certain it was a good idea.”
Cecily looked at her. “You were in love with Sebastian before you married him.”
“I wasfuriouswith Sebastian before I married him. There is a difference, and it is finer than people suppose.” A slight smile crossed Margaret’s face—the private, retrospective smile of a woman who had been through something difficult and come out the other side of it with the person she least thought she’d be with. “I am only saying that standing in a church, feeling uncertain, does not mean you are making a mistake. Sometimes it simply means you are paying attention.”
Cecily absorbed this. It was, she thought, either very wise or very convenient, and she was not currently in a position to determine which.
“He is nothing like I imagined,” she said, after a moment.
