Page 84 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

Could it really be possible? Had the impossible happened? Augusta never thought that she would be one to fall in love easily, and not surely not like this. It was a marriage of convenience, through and through, and there was no other possibility.

Surely, there is no place for love in a marriage of convenience. Familiarity, yes, and even a kind of fondness. But surely love was reserved for people who had more romantic notions about life.

She and the duke were not such people.

But nothing else explained the feeling that she had inside of her, and there was just no more denying it. Maybe it would be better if she stopped running from it altogether.

“I think I am falling in love with him.”

Augusta stared at her own hands after saying them. She had expected panic, perhaps embarrassment. Instead she felt something strange and quiet.

“I do not know when it happened,” she continued after a moment. “That is the absurd part. I can remember when I stopped thinking he might actually be a murderer, which was a useful milestone. I can remember when I began trusting him. I can remember the first time I saw him laugh and thought he looked entirely different when he did. But I cannot point to a single moment and say that was when it changed.”

“You usually cannot,” Alethea said. “That’s the best part, truly.”

Augusta looked at her.

Alethea smiled. “With Oliver, I kept waiting for certainty to arrive like some grand revelation. It did not. One day I simply realized that I had been arranging my entire emotional life around him for weeks.”

Temperance nodded. “Harper and I were worse. We spent so much time misunderstanding each other that when I finally understood how I felt, I was furious about it.”

Charity laughed. “That sounds like you.”

“It was extremely inconvenient.”

Augusta smiled despite herself. “And you were not afraid?”

“Of course I was,” Temperance said. “Love is a terrible arrangement if one values control. Suddenly another person can ruin your entire day by looking unhappy at breakfast.”

“That is not encouraging.”

“It is not supposed to be. I am telling you that fear does not mean you are mistaken.”

Alethea’s expression softened. “And it becomes less frightening once you stop treating love as a question you have to answer perfectly.”

Augusta leaned back in her chair. “You all make this sound very simple now that you are happily married.”

The three women exchanged glances.

“Duncan and I still argue,” Charity continued. “He still does things that infuriate me. Yesterday he told our son that vegetables make boys slower because he did not want to eat his own peas, and then seemed genuinely surprised when the child refused dinner.”

Augusta laughed.

Temperance nodded. “Harper and I had an argument last week about Joseph climbing onto the stable roof. I wanted him punished. Harper said he had done exactly the same thing at that age and survived. I pointed out that surviving one’s own stupidity is not a compelling argument for encouraging it in one’s children.”

Alethea smiled. “Oliver still insists upon buying things for the children without consulting me. Large things. Last month it was an enormous wooden horse that barely fits through the nursery door. He looked so pleased with himself that I could not even remain properly angry.”

Augusta listened to them and felt something inside her loosen.

Their happiness was not the absence of difficulty. That, perhaps, was what she had never understood when she was younger.

She had spent years imagining the perfect marriage as a destination one reached after selecting the correct man. Charity, Temperance, and Alethea had found something far less perfect and infinitely better.

A life.

“And you think I should tell him?” Augusta asked. The idea alone was enough to frighten her fully.

Temperance answered immediately. “Yes.”