Page 104 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

Augusta looked at him. “What was your relation with him like?”

“He was good to me,” he replied after a moment. “Whatever else may be said of him, I never doubted that he loved me, nor that he wished me to succeed him well. We were close, closer perhaps than a duke and his heir are meant to be. I never had cause to question it.”

“And your mother?”

The question seemed to cost him something to hear. Augusta watched him consider it.

“My mother stopped speaking to him,” he said. “I do not know what passed between them.”

”I asked once.” His voice had gone very quiet. “She told me it was not a matter for children, and that I ought to be grateful my father loved me as he did, whatever else he was. I’ve thought about it a lot since in the years that have passed but have never once been able to make sense of it.”

“A quarrel, perhaps,” Augusta ventured. “Something neither of them could forgive.”

“Perhaps,” he mused, “I did not have many companions my own age, you understand. I had my studies, and my father’s approval to chase, very little room in a day for anything else. At the time, I did not think of it as a deprivation. I only wanted to make him proud. It did not occur to me to wonder what I was missing until I was a great deal older, and by then it seemed a foolish thing to mourn.”

Augusta felt something ache in her chest that she could not entirely name.

“I cannot imagine it,” she admitted. “A house so quiet and your mother who would not say why.”

“Nor could I, and I lived it.” He attempted something like a smile. “I do not know why I am telling you all of this now, of all nights.”

They sat like that a long while, the fire dwindling.

Augusta did not know when she fell asleep against his shoulder, only that she woke to find grey morning light creeping in beneath the curtains, and Ronan already risen, already dressed, a pistol in his hand and the letter from the night before folded hard into his coat pocket.

“Ronan.” She was on her feet before she had entirely decided to be. “You cannot mean to go alone.”

“I mean to bring my daughter home,” he said, and there was nothing in his voice now of the boy who had spoken of his mother by the fire. This was the Duke of Ravenhill entire, cold and immovable as the raven on his cane. “The letter was plain enough on that point. I go alone, or I do not get her back at all.”

“Then let me come as far as….”

“No.” He crossed the room to her, and for a moment the hardness in his face gave way to something else. “If this does not end as I intend it to, I need you here. For Sarah’s sake, if she is returned to this house and finds no one waiting for her.”

He touched her cheek, just once, just briefly, as though he could not quite permit himself more than that. “I will come back,” he said. “I intend to. But if the worst should happen, you are to take her far from here. Do you understand me?”

She did not trust herself to speak, so she nodded instead, and watched him check the pistol a final time, and walk out into the pale morning to meet whatever waited for him there.

CHAPTER 18

The place had been chosen for their meeting was a stretch of woodland some three miles from the house, where an old hunting lodge had once stood before fire had taken the roof off it decades ago.

He had left instructions with his household before he had gone. Word had already been sent for the constables, quietly, though the letter had been plain enough that any obvious show of force would see Sarah harmed before help could reach her. He was to come alone.

He had every intention of appearing to obey that instruction, and no intention whatsoever of relying upon it alone to bring his daughter home.

The pistol sat cold and solid at his hip and he found himself thinking, absurdly, of Augusta’s face when she had told him the raven on the head of the murderer’s cane matched his own precisely.

The path he followed had once been a proper carriage road, back when the hunting lodge still stood entire and his grandfather’s guests had come here for a fortnight each autumn to shoot and drink and forget, for a little while, that they owed anyone anything. Ronan had come here as a boy himself, once or twice, before the fire, and he remembered it now only as a place full of laughter and gunsmoke and his father’s hand heavy and proud upon his shoulder. It seemed a cruel sort of irony that it should be here, of all places, that everything his father had built for him should come apart.

He saw the man before the man saw him, or seemed to. A tall figure stood within the broken walls of the lodge. As Ronan came nearer, the man turned, and Ronan saw his face clearly for the first time.

He did not know it. That was the first, strange thing his mind fixed upon and yet something in the shape of the jaw, the set of the shoulders, struck him with an unease he could not immediately place.

The man was tall, near enough Ronan’s own height, dark of hair, dark of eye, and he smiled at him.

“You came alone,” the man said, sounding almost pleased by it, as though Ronan had passed some manner of test. “I confess I was not entirely certain you would. You have quite the reputation for caution, Your Grace. A man who barely leaves his own house, they say, who has not attended above three balls in as many years, who trusts almost no one. I have made rather a study of you, if I am honest. It is not every day one gets to meet a man one has thought about so very often.”

“Where is my daughter?”