Page 40 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“Emily.” He said her name quietly. “Shoulders.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then something in her face gave, just slightly, and he watched her shoulders drop. The movement was small, and the effect was not. The composure was still there, but something had loosened, and she looked, in the space of that single exhale, younger and less certain and entirely real.
A small, teasing smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Wow. Amazing.”
“What?” she asked, confused as she searched his eyes.
“You actually know how to follow instructions,” he said. “That’s truly amazing.”
Her eyes closed briefly in the manner of a woman exercising considerable restraint. “You are insufferable,” she whispered.
Theodore watched her, the amusement he had felt moments ago evaporating into a sharp curiosity. He didn't release his mental grip on the question that had been festering since she had dropped her secret in his lap. “How did you come by the child, Emily? If there was no tryst, no grand, scandalous affair of your own, then how did a woman like you find herself at the center of this storm?”
Emily didn't flinch. She looked toward the lamp and let a soft smile cross her face. “I suppose, there is no point in keeping thesecret from you any longer,” she said. “You deserve to know at least. If this is the last time we are to speak, I may as well satisfy your curiosity.”
She was quiet for a moment. She looked at the curtained window before turning back to him. “My sister,” she said. “Her name was Anne. The one my parents held up as the measure of everything. But she fell in love with a man my family did not approve of. A carpenter's son. No title, no fortune, no standing. She left with him in the middle of the night, and my parents disowned her the same week.”
Theodore said nothing.
“I kept writing to her,” Emily continued. “In secret, of course. For six years I wrote to her, and she wrote back, and I kept every letter and told nobody.” She looked down at her hands. “A few months ago, I found out that she and her husband had died. They left a son. A six-year-old boy. His name is Frederick.”
The library was very still around them.
“Frederick is her son,” Emily said. “He was in the carriage when the accident happened. He has a scar on his cheek from it.” She looked up. “When I found out he was alone, I went and got him. My parents do not want him. I think he is too much of a reminder of what went wrong for them. They will send him to an orphanage in one month if I do not marry and take him with me. They refuse to raise him. That is the whole of it.”
Theodore looked at her. He had expected something. He was not entirely certain what, only that he had expected a story with cleaner edges than this one, something more manageable, something that would make more sense of the lengths she had gone to. He had not expected this.
“Who are you, Emily Pierce?” he said quietly.
She looked at him for a moment, then slowly walked forward to the table and leaned against it beside him, close enough that their arms were nearly touching, both of them facing the same direction now, looking out at the same dark room.
“You are going to extraordinary lengths...” he said. “...for a boy you have known for only a few months.”
“He is Anne's son.”
“I know that. I understand that. But you did not know him. You had never met him. Yet you are doing all of this to give him a good home.” He shook his head slowly. “I do not know if I would do the same.”
“You cannot put yourself in my shoes,” she said. “Society does not ask the same things of you that it asks of me.”
“No,” he agreed. “It does not. Which makes it more remarkable, not less.”
She said nothing to that.
He was quiet for a moment. “I heard about your sister. During her debut Season. She was the diamond, was she not?”
Emily turned to look at him.
“Before you,” he said. “Before any of it. Her sudden departure must have been difficult for you. The responsibility.” He held her gaze. “That must have been an extraordinary amount of pressure for one person to carry.”
Something shifted in her eyes. A slow, careful opening, the way a door opens when someone has finally decided to stop holding it shut. She looked at him, and he looked back at her, and in the low amber light of the library, he thought that he had been looking at Emily Pierce for years and had not, until this moment, been looking at her at all.
He had been so wrong about her.
He had decided what she was before he knew; he had looked at the composure and the precise, careful way she moved through every room and decided she was rigid. Decided she was cold. Decided there was nothing underneath the performance worth finding.
He had been spectacularly, completely wrong.
“I... I could help you,” he said, the words leaving his lips before his mind could fully vet them.
