Page 25

“You have two ponies.”

She looked at him. It was the look she had inherited from no one he could identify, because he had never been able to make it himself: the one that said she found him entirely loving and entirely wrong at the same time.

“Papa. That is not even remotely the same thing.” The deadpan way she said it was definitely inherited from him.

At his left, Juliet pressed her lips together. He could see it from the corner of his eye. He could also see the color in her cheeks, and the way her shoulders were drawn up slightly. He looked at the tablecloth and finished his wine.

Juliet steered them toward horses, which was merciful, and the conversation loosened again. She asked whether the stream at the edge of the south field held trout in summer, whether Eloise might one day be permitted to ride out past the garden wall, and what it had been like to learn to ride as a girl.

“I was seven when I first went riding without anyone leading the horse,” Juliet said. “My mother was furious.”

Eloise lit up. “Did you fall?”

“Oh, I did. Many times! The first time the horse was startled by a rabbit. Another time when I was showing off.”

Eloise leaned forward in her seat. “For whom?”

“Myself, mostly.”

Eloise giggled. Adam looked at Juliet sideways and found, to his considerable inconvenience, that she was already looking at him.

She did not look away at once. Neither did he. Her eyes were very blue in the candlelight, and her cheeks still held color. He could see the faint sheen of her collarbone above the neckline of her dress, and he knew he would need significantly more wine.

He looked away first.

“You can see the ponies tomorrow,” he said to Eloise. “Both of us will come.”

Eloise looked between them again with quiet triumph, and ate her dinner.

Then dessert arrived, and Eloise attacked the syllabub with glee. She was on her second spoonful when she said, without looking up:

“Did Mama like horses?” The question was quiet, almost offhand. Almost.

Adam closed his eyes for a brief moment and set down his fork. He was never prepared, no matter how many times it happened, for when his daughter asked about her mother.

“Eloise,” he said.

“I only wanted to know!” she argued, but still wasn’t looking at him.

Adam cleared his throat. “That…that is not a discussion for tonight.”

She looked up then, and her eyes were very direct and very dark, the precise shade of eyes he saw in the mirror each morning, and they held his gaze with a steadiness that was also his. “You never tell me later, Papa. You always say that, but you never tell me anything.”

He heard Juliet’s chair shift. “She has a point,” his new duchess said, quietly, from his left.

He turned to glare at her. “This does not concern you.”

“This concerns Eloise,” Juliet said, her voice still level.

“But it does not concern you,” he snapped back, and he almost immediately regretted the sharpness in his voice.

He knew that he was being difficult, maybe even petulant, but he never wanted to think about that woman, and he certainly never wanted to talk about her, especially not to the woman he’d married because of another contract.

That woman was not backing down, however. “She deserves to⁠—”

“Duchess.” He kept his voice low, but there was heat behind it, and Juliet could hear it too, because her chin lifted. “Eloise is my daughter, and the decisions about what she knows and when she knows it are mine to make.”

“Your decisions have left her without a single memory of her own mother.”