Page 45 of An Offer by Her Arranged Duke

Adam didn’t move away from the doorway. “It can wait until morning,” he said, but Juliet swallowed.

“I… I would rather not,” she pressed.

He held her eyes. His jaw shifted.

“I will wait here,” she said. “If… if you would like to change first.”

He looked at her for another moment before finally stepping aside so she could come in.

The fire was lit in the grate despite the hour, burning down to low amber coals. She understood why when she looked at him. Someone had built it to help him dry out. He moved toward it without speaking, and she followed, and they each took one of the chairs angled toward the hearth.

Juliet had not been in this room before. It was larger than hers, and sparser; fewer ornaments, a desk clear of clutter, the books on the shelves arranged by spine height rather than sentiment. A horse portrait hung above the mantel, but nothing sat on the mantelpiece except a single silver-framed miniature she could not make out from where she sat.

Adam was looking at the fire. His forearms rested on his knees, his hands loose, but his shoulders were not.

The heat from the grate reached her, and she was grateful for it. She had not quite realized she was still cold until now.

“I… I wanted to apologize for… this afternoon,” she started, her voice shaking a bit, so she took a breath. “I’m sorry for taking her to the water without telling you about it first, but… I also want to understand what happened at the lake,” she said.

His jaw moved, but he still did not look at her.

“Your reaction was not only about Eloise being in the water. I have seen you correct her before, and I have seen you frightened for her. But what I saw at the lake was not the same thing.”

“You presume a great deal,” he said finally.

“Perhaps.” She kept her voice level even though her heart was pounding very hard in her throat. “But our lives are now entangled in ways neither of us arranged. Eloise is part of that. Whatever you carry that leads you to forbid a child from a lake… She is going to carry some part of it too. She already carries it. She knew not to go there, and she could not say why.”

He was quiet for a long while. The fire shifted, a low crumble of ash. He watched it.

“Eloise’s mother,” he said. He stopped. He looked at the fire with the stillness of a man taking a careful step. “Charlotte.” The name came out without bitterness this time. Only flat, as a proper name, stripped of everything else. “She drowned.”

The air in the room changed. Juliet’s hands went still in her lap.

“At the lake?” she asked quietly.

The muscle in his jaw moved. He only nodded in response, and Juliet’s heart sank. She pressed her hands over her face and sighed.

“I did not know how she died,” she said after she uncovered her face. “No one told me. If I had known—” She stopped herself before she could say sorry again, having said it twice already, the word shrinking each time. “I would not have gone that way. I would not have taken Eloise there.”