For a few moments, they rode in silence, hooves striking softly over the path, the trees throwing shifting strips of shadow across their coats.
Rowan’s mind had been split for days now. He spent his hours sorting the wreckage of the press, yet his mind kept snagging on a single, jagged fact: Emmeline was to become his.
“Any word from Juliet?” Frederick asked at last, his tone losing some of its mockery.
“No.”
“Nothing at all?”
Rowan shook his head once. “Nothing. But she will write again.”
Frederick studied him. “You sound certain.”
“I know my sister.”
The words left him easily enough, but even as he said them, a colder thought moved beneath them.
Did he?
He had believed he knew Juliet well enough to arrange her future. Yet she had fled, had bartered her own wedding dress for another woman’s clothes and vanished into the countryside. It was not the act itself that troubled him most. It was the fact that he had never imagined she was capable of it.
Frederick exhaled. “Let us hope she writes soon, then. Else all this very expensive illness may begin to look suspiciously healthy.”
Rowan ignored that and kept riding. Frederick was quiet only for a heartbeat.
“And your fiancée?” he asked.
Rowan’s hands tightened slightly on the reins before he forced them to ease again. “What of her?”
Frederick made a soft sound, one of those infuriating, knowing sounds that never improved a morning. “Have I irritated you already? We have only just begun.”
“I am marrying her because I offered to repair the damage done to her.”
“Yes,” Frederick said. “Out of duty. I know. You have said so often enough that I half expect duty to climb onto your horse behind you and ask to share your saddle.”
Rowan shot him a look.
Frederick only laughed. “Come now. Even a dutiful man may appreciate that Lady Emmeline is not difficult to look at.”
The image hit him like a physical blow—honey-brown eyes defiant behind a veil, the pulse thrumming in the hollow of her throat, and the stubborn, beautiful curve of her mouth when she surrendered to the inevitable. He hated how instinctively his blood heated at the thought.
“That is not the point,” he said.
“Mm.”
“Do not test me.”
“I have no need,” Frederick replied blandly. “Your temper appears admirably tested already. Though I must say, inviting her to dinner before the engagement is publicly announced was a bold move. Will you tease your fiancée beneath the table, or wait until the soup is cleared?”
Rowan turned so sharply in the saddle that Frederick laughed aloud. “You are a cad.”
“I was under the impression you used to find that admirable.”
“A long time ago.”
“Yes, and now you are a duke with a tragic expression and a seven-year-old son, which I admit has diminished your charm somewhat, though not fatally.”
Rowan should have answered, but his mind had gone where it had no business going again—to the memory of Emmeline in the carriage, looking up at him with that dangerous mix of intelligence and softness, speaking of love as though she had made a grave of it in her own chest and still felt it stirring there.
