Page 77 of Duke of Moonstone
Stop it. He is not coming; you knew he would not, and looking at the door will not change it.
The disappointment was nothing new. It settled into her chest like water pooling in low ground—quietly, filling the spaces that were already there. Next to it, sharper, sat something older. Something she recognized from drawing rooms and ballrooms and every morning she had ever spent waiting for someone to choose her yet watching them pick someone else instead.
This is precisely what you warned yourself against. On the terrace. In the dark. Every single time you told yourself not to hope.
She had warned herself. She had been cautious. She had built her walls, measured her distances, and plainly told Lavinia that she would not lose her heart to a man who never offered his.
And then he had kissed her, and every wall she had ever built had come down like paper in rain.
“Frances?”
She turned back to Emily. The child was watching her with those brown eyes, too perceptive, and Frances arranged her face into something warm and present, entirely focused on the person who deserved her attention.
“I have an idea,” Frances said. She set down her knife. “Would you like to spend the morning with your grandmama? I believe she mentioned wanting to hear the rest of that story about the princess.”
Emily’s whole body changed. She sat up straighter—impossibly straighter, given that she had already been sitting like a small soldier—and her eyes went wide and bright with the uncomplicated joy of a child who had been offered exactly the thing she wanted most.
“May I really?”
“You may really.”
“Now?”
“After you finish your breakfast.”
Emily looked at her plate. Looked at Frances. Picked up her bread, took an enormous bite, chewed twice, and swallowed. “Finished.”
Frances laughed. The sound surprised her. It was genuine—pulled out of her by Emily’s eagerness—and it unlocked something in her chest that had been tight since she woke.
“That,” she said, “was not precisely what I meant.”
“You said finish. I finished.”
“You inhaled it.”
“Inhaling is finishing. Just faster.”
Frances looked at this child—this small, serious, brave child who had lost everything and found her way back to laughter—and the ache in her chest was not about Alexander. Not entirely. It was about the morning and the empty chair and the way Emily’s hand reached for hers across the table as naturally as breathing.
She took it. Squeezed it.
“Come, then,” she said. “Let us not keep your grandmama waiting.”
Emily slid from her chair and took Frances’s hand, and they walked together toward the door. Frances did not look back at the empty chair. She did not need to.
She already knew it would be there.
“The Harker cottage is the worst of them, Your Grace. The east wall wants repainting, and the roof will not survive another winter.”
Alexander walked the path along the lower boundary with his bailiff by his side, the morning air sharp against his face. The ground was soft from last night’s rain, and their boots made twin tracks in the mud as they moved between the tenant properties that lined the southern edge of the estate.
“And the others?”
“The Pritchard place needs new window frames. Damp has got into the sills. And the drainage on the lower fields—that is the greater concern, Your Grace. The ditches have silted up. If we do not clear them before autumn, the whole eastern pasture will flood.”
“Have you an estimate for the work?”
“Forty pounds for the cottages. Another sixty for the drainage if we can get the labor before harvest.”
