“Your son,” she repeated.
“Aaron,” Rowan said. “He is seven.”
Something softened in her immediately despite everything else. A child. There had been no mention of him during the previousday beyond the brief glimpse at the chapel, but this felt like the best thing out of the deal. If nothing else, if all romance had been stripped from the arrangement before it had even begun, there would at least be a child to love.
The thought ached.
“I should ask about Lady Juliet,” she said, because if she did not slow the moment, she would be swept under it.
Rowan’s shoulders went subtly rigid. “What of her?”
“If I accept,” Emmeline said carefully, “this situation becomes mine and Papa’s as well. What becomes of your sister matters. To us both.”
He pinned her with that unblinking stare. “My men continue to search. Until she is found, the story will be that illness prevented her wedding. If fortune favors us, society will soon find some fresher scandal to devour.”
Emmeline folded her hands in her lap. “If we marry too quickly, no one will believe the illness. They will simply say she fled and that you are marrying to cover it.”
Her father winced faintly.
The Duke did not. He only seemed to consider it. “Then we will wait.”
“How long?”
“Three weeks,” he said at once. “Long enough for the banns to be read properly.”
The firmness of it unsettled her again. He decided so quickly, without tenderness or any hesitation, that it could leave room for fantasy.
She glanced at her father before speaking again. “And this marriage… would you view it as an alliance in the broader sense?”
The words were chosen carefully, but she saw at once from the change in the Duke’s eyes that he understood exactly what she meant.
“You and your father would be my family,” he said. “I would assist him in every way necessary.”
Her father let out the smallest breath, almost a sound of prayer.
Emmeline’s shoulders eased too, though far more carefully. “I see.”
“And Lady Juliet?” she asked after a moment, because if this was to be her life then she would know the shape of it. “If she is found?”
“She will live with us until she chooses otherwise, or until another match is made,” the Duke said. Then, after the slightest pause, “You will get on with her. She gets on with everyone.”
His offer was so respectable it left no room for complaint, only surrender.
He had behaved with more honor than many men would have shown. He had not hidden from the damage done to her. He had gone after Foxdale. He had returned when that failed. He was offering not only rank but protection, stability, and help for her father without forcing them to beg for it.
And there was Aaron—a child she might perhaps love and guide and comfort in the ways her own mother once had for her.
There was no romance in it. No promise that he would look at her across a room because he could not help himself, though the memory of his gaze yesterday made that thought dangerously unstable. No promise of tenderness, of affection, of a marriage made warm by choice rather than built from necessity. But women had lived without those things before. Women had lived well enough with less.
And what right had she, of all people, to refuse a duke offering everything she had once tried to secure through Foxdale, only in stronger hands and upon terms far more honorable?
She lifted her eyes to his.
“Your Grace,” she said, and heard the faint unsteadiness beneath her own calm. “I am grateful for the generosity of your offer, and I understand the honor it represents.”
Her father had gone absolutely still.
Emmeline drew a breath. “I accept.”
