The words struck like a slap.
Emmeline stared at him. “Papa.”
“I do not mean?—”
“No,” she said, and the hurt in her own voice startled her. “Nothing happened. Nothing. Everything I told you was the truth.”
Color rose in his face at once. “Forgive me. I should not have asked it so baldly.”
“No,” she repeated, quieter now but no less firm. “I would not willingly do anything to endanger our future. Surely you know that.”
His expression softened into something deeply sad.
“I do know it,” he said. “That is precisely why I despise that I had to ask.”
The anger slipped out of her almost as quickly as it had risen, leaving only exhaustion and that aching tenderness she had always felt for him beneath everything else.
He reached for her hand then, and this time, when she gave it, she did not resist.
“I have raised a very responsible daughter,” he said softly.
The words should not have hurt. They were praise. They were love. But they pressed exactly on the bruise of the day, because responsibility had brought her here. Responsibility had led her to accept Foxdale. Responsibility had made her swallow every romantic hope she had ever had and call it maturity.
And now she sat in a carriage in her wedding gown, unwanted by one duke and half-promised to another.
“I only hope,” he said, staring at their joined hands rather than at her, “that everything will be all right in the end.”
Emmeline lifted her chin, though the movement cost her something.
“It will,” she said.
He gave her a faint, tired smile, perhaps because he wanted to believe her.
When the silence returned, it felt gentler than before, but her mind would not rest. It kept circling back to the Duke of Ironford. To the hard line of his face when he promised he would set things right. To the rough steadiness of his hand when he had helped her from the carriage. To the impossible, alarming certainty in his voice when he said he would marry her himself.
She ought to have thought of him only as the man whose household had disrupted her life. Only as another stranger onto whom circumstance might force her. But when she closed her eyes, she did not picture danger first.
She pictured his gaze.
And the fact that, for one terrible, foolish moment, standing before him in her wedding silk, she had not felt invisible at all.
“The wedding will not take place today,” Rowan’s voice cut through the chapel yard.
The murmurs died. Guests lingered at the edges—women clutching fans with the sharp hunger for scandal, men watching with the strained silence of those already preparing the evening’s gossip.
Rowan stepped forward another pace, broad shoulders squared.
“I apologize for the inconvenience,” he continued. “Lady Juliet has been taken suddenly unwell, and the matter cannot be helped. I trust your understanding.”
He did not trust their understanding in the slightest. He trusted only the force of his own title and the fact that most people preferred swallowing their hunger for gossip when a duke ordered them to.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then the spell broke. One by one, the guests began to peel away, skirts rustling over the gravel, carriage doors opening, voices dropping into hushed, eager threads that they no longer bothered to hide properly.
Rowan watched them go with his jaw clenched so tightly that the ache had settled into his temples.
He felt Frederick come up beside him at last, but did not look at him immediately.
