Page 51 of Duke of Moonstone
“Yes,” Alexander said. “I believe we shall.”
Frances walked forward, and Emily—after a pause so brief it might have been imagined—followed her. Alexander watched them move together across the marble floor, the woman in the rose silk and the child in the traveling dress, and he stood in his entrance hall and felt the ground beneath his feet shift into something unfamiliar.
For all their differences—the arguments, the silences, the careful distance they maintained like sentries guarding opposing walls—they were now bound by something that had nothing to do with contracts or convenience or the terms they had negotiated over cold toast.
They were responsible, together, for this small and vulnerable person.
The realization settled into his bones with a significance that was neither unpleasant nor comfortable and was going to change everything.
However temporary it might be.
CHAPTER 20
“Your Grace, Her Grace is awake and expecting you.”
Frances looked up from the picture book she had been reading aloud to Emily. Mrs. Wells stood in the doorway with her hands clasped before her, and Frances caught the small, knowing smile the housekeeper directed at Emily before smoothing it away.
“Thank you, Mrs. Wells.” Frances closed the book and set it on the side table. She turned to Emily. “Would you like to come with me? The Dowager Duchess is very excited to meet you.”
Emily stood and adjusted her frock skirt.
Alexander had made no move to arrange this introduction. In the three days since Emily’s arrival, he had appeared at meals, inquired after the child’s well-being, and otherwise continued the business of being a duke with the single-minded focus of aman who believed that proximity to a problem was the same as attending to it.
Frances had waited, given him the opportunity to do the thing himself. He had not taken it, and so she had gone to Mrs. Wells that morning and asked whether the Dowager Duchess was well enough for visitors.
They left the drawing room and made their way toward the staircase.
“Your Grace?”
Frances looked down. Emily’s face was tilted up toward her, and for a moment, the child’s expression was open in a way Frances had not seen before.
“Her Grace wrote often to me.”
“She did?”
Emily nodded. “Sometimes I read the letters myself, and sometimes Miss Bennet did.”
How kind of Margaret to acquaint herself with the girl before her arrival. Frances suspected that Alexander was unaware of this.
“I have never had a grandmother, Your Grace.”
The words were soft, and Frances stopped walking. She turned and reached down and took Emily’s small hand in hers.
“Now you do,” she said.
Emily’s fingers clenched around hers, tighter than Frances expected from such a small hand. They paused in the quiet hallway then Frances gave her hand a gentle squeeze, and they kept walking.
They reached Margaret’s door. Frances knocked, and the voice that answered was warm and immediate.
“Come in, come in!”
Frances opened the door and stepped through, Emily’s hand still in hers.
Margaret was propped against her pillows with a shawl around her shoulders and her silver-threaded hair brushed back from a face that was already bright with expectation. The moment her eyes met Emily’s, something changed in that face that Frances could only describe as blooming.
“Oh,” Margaret breathed. “Oh, my dear child. There you are.”
With a bright smile, Emily stepped forward and into Margaret’s embrace. She reached for the bedside table where a small porcelain dish sat filled with sugarplums. She lifted it and held it toward Emily.
