Page 71 of The Madame Catches Her Duke

“No one has worried over me…ever.” Marce swallowed to keep her voice from cracking. “What were you worried about? I have had many years of experience caring for myself and my family.”

“You said you were leaving London, that I shouldn’t fret about you any longer.” He stared at her across the mere inches that separated them, the dim lighting causing his green eyes to glow in the low light. “All I’ve done over the last eight years is fret over you. Not always for the same reasons”—He sighed—“but not a day has passed where I wasn’t worried.”

“Yet, you’ve kept your distance?” she asked.

“That is what you wanted…what our arrangement entailed.”

After their night together, it was unlikely that Marce would ever view their arrangement in such a manner, nor could she fathom how they had gone so many years without discovering the passion that lay between them. He’d started a flame within her that Marce never dreamed could be sparked, let alone stoked to a burning, uncontrollable need.

Nevertheless, she would not allow herself to believe that their night together meant anything more than what it had been: one night of passion to see her through the many lonely years ahead.

“Perhaps it is I who should give you two a bit of privacy.” When they both turned toward the duchess as she began to fuss with her blankets, a coy smile drew her lips upward.

“No,” they protested in unison, both fearing she’d attempt to rise from her sickbed.

A knock sounded on the door, and Marce leaned forward to rearrange the duchess’s coverings.

“That must be the physician.” Rowan stood, nodding to Marce to do the same.

“Enter,” Leona called, her tone stronger than Marce had heard it in some time.

The door opened, and Pearl shuffled into the room with the Hadlow physician a step behind.

“We will allow the doctor to attend to you.” Rowan gave the duchess a curt bow before pivoting and stalking from the room.

“I will have a meal prepared and delivered.” Marce smiled, needing time alone to think through everything she’d learned—about her mother, Julian, Rowan, the duchess…and especially, herself. “Duck soup and fresh bread.”

“That would be delightful, my girl.” Leona settled against the pillows at her back and slipped her hands under the covers. “If you will do me a favor.”

Marce glanced over her shoulder when Leona motioned for her to lean close. Pearl and the physician were nearly upon them now.

“Yes, anything.”

“Take care of Rowan,” Leona whispered hoarsely. “He does not understand what happened all those years ago. I fear life is very black and white to him. We both know that in the varying shades of grey is where a person truly finds who they are and what they want from this life.”

Marce nodded several times before turning and fleeing from the room, without so much as a simple greeting for Pearl. Did she know what Leona spoke of? Never had Marce’s life been black and white. No decision she’d ever made had been clear and unquestionable. How had she never realized she lived in that grey area, and Rowan saw things as black and white? Not right and wrong, certainly, because what had transpired in their past hadn’t been so easy for either of them to accept.

Once in the deserted corridor, the door to Leona’s private chambers closed at her back, Marce leaned her head against the cold wood. The duchess was correct. She’d always lived her life in the sliver of grey—that space between black and white. Nothing was ever as it appeared with her family. Hardly anyone made the connection between Marce and who she truly was, the daughter of a marquess. No one suspected that her younger sister, Judith, was a reformed thief. It had been impossible for Rowan to consider that Craven House was not what it appeared.

All these years, and Marce had never taken steps to correct anyone’s thinking either.

Yes, Leona was correct. She thrived in those varying shades of grey, while Rowan lived his life believing only in black and white.

He’d witnessed his father with another woman, therefore assumed his father guilty of the most awful betrayal.

He’d heard rumors of Craven House’s famed legacy as a notorious London brothel and sought no further information, just condemned the house as such.

He’d made assumptions based on what he thought to be true without discovering the varying shades of reality firsthand.

…and Leona assumed she could show him his misguided views?

Marce hadn’t had time to discover the multitude of grey coloring her life, how was she ever to explain it all to Rowan?

Chapter 30

Rowan halted near his desk in the study when he heard Marce’s footsteps approach and pause outside the door he’d left open, waiting for her arrival. He knew with a certainty he felt to his very bones that Marce would come to him—be it several hours or mere minutes after she left the duchess’s private chamber.

Even he could not have imagined it would be less than the time it took to pace the room several times and decide on pouring a drink while he waited.