Page 101 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

All she wanted in that moment was for Sarah to be okay.

Ronan looked at the letter again, as though the answer might have appeared since the last time he read it. “It does not say.”

“But that makes no sense,” she said. “If it were money, surely he would say so. Or if he wanted something from you, surely he would tell you what it was.”

Ronan was quiet.

Augusta searched his face. “Does he say anything about Sarah?”

This time Ronan’s silence lasted only a second, but it was the longest second of the night. “No.”

Nothing about whether Sarah was safe or about whether she had been frightened or hurt, whether she was warm. Augusta had never realized how many ordinary things there were to fear for a child until now.

Ronan folded the letter and turned as though he meant to go at once.

“Where are you going?” Augusta asked.

“To speak to the men searching the grounds.”

“They are already searching. What will you tell them that you have not already told them?”

He looked at her, his expression closing further. “I do not know, Augusta. But I should be doing something.”

She stepped closer and caught his sleeve before he could move away. “There is nothing you can do until morning.”

His jaw tightened.

“You are going to walk from room to room, ask the same questions again, and by morning you will have exhausted yourself without learning anything.”

Under any other circumstances, he might have argued. Augusta almost wanted him to. Instead, he looked at her for a long moment and then said, “What would you have me do?”

“Sit with me.”

The question in his eyes was almost absurd. Sit? While his daughter was missing? While there was a letter in his hand instructing him to meet a stranger in the morning?

“Yes,” Augusta said before he could object. “Sit. Worry, if you must, because heaven knows I cannot seem to stop doing it either. But do not spend the entire night punishing yourself. We have to be patient.”

Ronan’s gaze dropped briefly to his cane, then returned to her. “You have become very commanding.”

“I married a duke. I assumed some of it would transfer.”

“Fine then.”

She was surprised that he even agreed, but did not push her luck further by asking him more questions.

Neither of them seemed inclined to sit properly in the chairs. Augusta lowered herself onto the rug with none of the care she would ordinarily have given the skirts of her ball gown. Ronan sat beside her, stretching his injured leg toward the heat. The letter remained in his hand.

Augusta watched him read the letter again.

“You have already read it, why must you torture yourself all over again?”

“There may be something I missed.”

“I know that you’re thorough, so I cannot believe that you will have missed anything. Give it to me.”

His eyes moved to her. “Why?”

“So that you stop torturing yourself with it.”