Page 56 of Duke of Moonstone
It took longer than it should have.
CHAPTER 21
“Might I have a word?”
Frances waited until Miss Bennet had taken Emily upstairs, until the dining room had been cleared and the footmen had retreated, and the house had settled into its evening quiet.
Then she found him in the hallway outside the dining room, already moving toward his study.
The Duke stopped and turned. “Of course.”
They walked quietly to his study. He held the door open. She entered. The fire burned low, the brandy decanter sat untouched on the side table, and the room smelled of ink and leather with a stillness unique to spaces where only one person spent time.
Frances did not sit. She clasped her hands before her and faced him.
“I heard you this evening,” she said. “Through the study door when Emily and I were passing on our way to dinner.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. “What did you hear?”
“‘How difficult is it to find one little chit across England?’” She held his gaze. “You were speaking of Eleanor.”
It was not a question. She watched the confirmation move through his expression—a tightening of the jaw, a slight narrowing of the eyes—before he crossed to his desk and stood behind it, as though the furniture between them was a necessary fortification.
“Yes,” he said.
“You told me at breakfast that you did not wish to discuss her. That she had made her choice and was living with the consequences.” Frances tilted her head. “And yet you have men searching for her.”
“The two are not contradictory.”
“They are entirely contradictory.”
“She is my sister. Whatever choices she has made, I have a responsibility to know where she is.”
“To know where she is?” Frances repeated. “To prevent her marriage?”
The silence that followed answered the question more honestly than he would have.
Frances drew a breath. “What have they found?”
The Duke’s hands rested on the desk. His fingers pressed flat against the surface, and she watched the knuckles whiten before he spoke. “My men reported locating her in Cumberland. Near Penrith. Close to the Scottish border.”
Cumberland.
“When?”
“Four days ago.” His jaw worked. “By the time they reached the inn where she had been staying, she was gone. She and Fraser had left that morning. No one could say in which direction.”
Frances looked at him across the desk. The fire crackled. The clock ticked. And the truth of it settled between them with the quiet inevitability of water finding its level.
“If she was in Cumberland four days ago,” Frances said, “she is in Scotland now.”
He said nothing.
“She has crossed the border. She may already be married. You know this.”
“I know nothing of the sort.”
“You know it.” She took a step closer to the desk. “You knew it before I said it. You knew it when your men sent their report, and you knew it this evening when you were shouting at whoever was on the other side of that conversation.”
