Page 46 of Duke of Moonstone
The words came out low. Controlled. She had intended them that way because they were standing in an open hallway, and anyone might walk past, and she was not going to give this house another thing to whisper about. Alexander’s jaw tightened. He glanced left then right, assessing the hallway.
“Not here,” he said.
He turned and walked. Not toward her rooms, Margaret’s, or any of the other places in the house where they had engaged in careful, measured interactions over the past week. Instead, heheaded to his study—his last refuge. The room with the closed door, the brandy decanter, and the ledgers that never caught him off guard.
Frances followed. Her pulse was very loud in her own ears.
They reached the study. He opened the door, stood aside, and she walked through it, chin level, hands clasped, the last remnants of her composure held together by nothing more than habit and spite.
The door closed. The click of the latch was very final.
Frances’s composure broke.
“You have a child?” She turned to face him, and the words came out sharper than she had planned which was not a concern because she was no longer planning. “All this time—through the wedding, through every breakfast and every dinner and every interminable conversation about duty and arrangements and terms—and you never once thought to mention that there was a child?”
“She is not my child.”
“That is not the point!”
“It is precisely the point.” The Duke moved into the room. Not toward her. Toward the window where he stood with his back to her and his hands clasped behind him and his shoulders set inthe rigid line that meant he was bracing for something. “Emily is my ward. Her parents died last year in a carriage accident. They were distant relatives and close family friends. I assumed guardianship as a matter of duty.”
Duty. Of course. Everything is duty.
“I arranged for her to stay with a governess in the countryside,” the Duke continued. He did not turn from the window. “A respectable woman. Well-qualified. Emily receives an excellent education, proper meals, and appropriate supervision. She has everything she needs.”
“Everything except a home.” Frances heard her own voice harden. “Everything except people who love her.”
“I have provided for her material needs and her education,” he rguedsaid. “What more could a child require?”
Frances stared at him.
What more could a child require?
She remembered herself at age eight. She pictured the house shrinking around them, room by room, as her father’s debts consumed everything. She thought of Lavinia—seventeen, barely older than a child—sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of bills and a face trying hard not to show fear. She recalled the night she woke from a nightmare and went searching for her father, only to find Lavinia asleep in a chair just outside her doorbecause Lavinia had known she would come looking and had wanted to be the one she found.
“Affection,” Frances said. “Attention. A sense that she belongs somewhere. That someone in this world chose her, not out of obligation but because they wanted her.”
“Sentiment.”
“Humanity.”
His jaw worked. “I am not equipped —”
“You are not willing. There is a difference.”
“You presume to know what I am willing to do?”
“I presume nothing.” She took a step closer. “I have watched you run this household like a military campaign. Every meal planned. Every hour accounted for. Every person in their proper place, doing their proper duty, and heaven forbid anyone step outside the lines you have drawn.” Another step. “And somewhere in the countryside, a little girl is sitting in a house that is not hers with a woman who is paid to care for her, wondering why nobody cares for her.”
“You do not know what she is wondering.”
“I know what any child would wonder. I know because I have been that child.”
The words fell between them before she could weigh them. She had not meant to say it. She had not meant to give him that—that piece of herself, that particular truth that she kept folded and tucked away where it could not be examined in daylight.
The Duke said nothing. His gaze was on her, and for a moment, the room was very quiet.
Frances drew a breath. She held it. She let it go.
