Page 43 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
From somewhere deeper in the maze came the frustrated sound of a pair encountering a dead end, a clipped male voice followed by silence. Ahead, the path forked again without warning.
The Duke stopped. So did she.
Three exits. No board yet. She looked at each in turn, trying to calculate the geometry, the way she'd done as a girl in Shropshire when she'd pretended it was a game and not a method of forcing herself to remember a layout she had spent two weeks memorizing in secret.
"The center will be north-east of where we stand," the Duke said. He was studying the paths with the same focused attention he brought to everything. "The right-hand path angles in that direction. The others do not."
"Agreed." She moved toward it. "Though I notice you've been keeping track of our turns."
"Force of habit."
"Indeed?"
He didn't answer immediately. They entered the narrower passage, and the hedges pressed in tighter on both sides; the light above them reduced to a long strip of sky.
"My father," he said finally. "He believed that a man who could not find his own way out of a situation had no business walking into one."
She absorbed that carefully. There was something underneath the words. "He sounds very exacting."
"He was." Another pause, shorter. "He was right, more often than I was willing to admit at the time."
The passage opened suddenly into a wider section, and there was the third board.
I can be broken without being touched. I can be kept without being held. What am I?
Julia read it.
Her breath came in evenly. The answer was immediate and obvious, and sat in her chest like a stone she had been carrying without knowing its name.
A promise.
She read the words again. She thought of her father's note, folded and re-folded in the inner pocket she had sewn into every traveling dress she owned, because some habits began young and never left. She thought of the morning she had found it on the windowsill and stood there for a long time with it in her hands, weighing what it meant to tell the Duke and what it meant to keep this secret. She thought of Poppy saying, “Follow your conscience, Julia. It's always led you right.”
She had not been certain her conscience had an opinion until now.
A promise.
She picked up the sealed envelope beneath the board and held it.
"The path ahead branches," the Duke said. He was looking at the two exits.
"I know." She did not move immediately. The sounds of the maze surrounded them, the distant bounce of other voices, a burst of laughter somewhere to the left, the steady, quiet of the hedges in the light wind. "Leander."
He turned.
She had thought about how to begin this conversation so many times that she had worn the words thin. Now that she was standing inside it, she found that none of her prepared openings would come. She set them aside.
"My father contacted me," she said. "Two nights ago. He left a note on my windowsill."
He went very still.
"I have been deliberating over what to do with the information ever since." She met his eyes and held them. "I am aware that the arrangement between us requires my honesty, and I will not pretend that I have not been slow in offering it. But I wished to be certain of my own reasons before I spoke." She kept her hands steady at her sides. "I am telling you now because I have chosen to trust you. Not because I am compelled to, but because it is a choice I have made freely. I should like you to know that distinction."
The maze was noticeably quiet.
"He is staying at the Tavistock Inn." She said it plainly. "He wishes to meet with me. I believe he intends to ask me to use whatever position this arrangement affords to help him travel north undetected." She paused. "I have not replied to him. I have not gone to him. I have not told anyone, other than my sister, until this moment."
The Duke looked at her for a long time. She could not read his face with any certainty, and she did not try. She had given him the information. What he did with it was no longer in her hands.
