Page 34 of Duke of Moonstone
“She is persistent.”
“She liked you.”
“She liked my chalk.”
The Duchess laughed. It was the same laugh from the schoolroom—unguarded, genuine, filling the small space of thecarriage—and Alexander felt it ripple through him like warm water poured into cold.
Stop that.
He looked out the window. They were passing through the broader streets now, the buildings opening up, the traffic thickening as they moved west toward Mayfair. He watched a cart loaded with barrels turn a corner and told himself he was thinking about nothing in particular.
“You are good with them.”
The words left his mouth before he had authorized them.
The Duchess went quiet. He could feel her looking at him, and he kept his gaze on the window for a moment longer because turning to face whatever was in her eyes seemed inadvisable, and then he turned anyway because not turning was worse.
She was staring at him. Not with suspicion. Not with the guarded wariness he had grown accustomed to seeing directed at him across breakfast tables. She was staring at him with something that looked very much like surprise and underneath the surprise, something warmer.
“Thank you,” she said. A pause. “For accompanying me today.”
“It was my duty.”
“Yes. You mentioned that.” But the way she said it was not sharp. It was almost amused. “Still, thank you.”
The carriage rocked gently over a rough stretch of road, and neither of them spoke for a moment, and the silence was warm in a way that made Alexander’s chest do something he was not prepared to account for.
“Perhaps…” the Duchess said, and she dropped her gaze briefly to her hands before bringing it back to his. “Perhaps we might visit again next week?”
He should have considered it. He should have weighed the implications—the time and the fact that this was precisely the sort of thing that would erode the boundaries of their arrangement.
He nodded.
Her face changed subtly. Not dramatically, or in a way visible from across the small space. But her eyes brightened, and the corners of her mouth lifted, and there was a genuine, uncomplicated joy in her expression that Alexander could not remember seeing before—not at the wedding, not at breakfast, and not in any of the moments they shared since the masquerade. This was something new. Something she had given him without realizing.
She loved those children. She knelt on dirty floors for them, learned their names, tracked their progress from week to week, and celebrated their victories as though they were her own. Shehad fought him at the breakfast table for the right to continue seeing them. She had walked into his study and demanded it.
A woman who loved children that deeply.
A woman who had told him, plainly and without apology, that she did not want any of her own.
Why did she tell me she did not want an heir?
The question turned in his mind, slow and heavy, and underneath it something sharper pressed upward—a thought he did not want to think but could not prevent from forming.
Perhaps it is not children she objects to.
He looked at her profile. The curve of her jaw. The small strand of hair that had come loose during the visit was resting against her neck. She was still talking, something about a book of primers she wanted to bring next time, and her voice was warm, and her face was open, and she was, in this moment, entirely unguarded.
Perhaps she simply cannot bear the thought of having children with me.
The thought hit with the weight of a stone dropped into still water—silent, conclusive, it radiated outward in expanding rings that he could not halt.
Does she consider me a beast?
The carriage turned through the gates of Whitestone House, and Alexander said nothing, and the Duchess continued talking about primers, and the distance between them—the distance he had built and negotiated and defended—felt suddenly terribly small and impossibly vast at the same time.
CHAPTER 15
