Page 62 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“Is that so very shocking to you?”

“I…”

“It is the entire purpose of the Season, is it not, to display the year’s marriageable women like prize mares and see who bids highest?” She said it without bitterness, almost cheerfully, but Frederick found he didn’t care for the comparison at all. “I havedecided to stop waiting for it to happen to me, and instead go and accomplish it myself. You ought to admire the efficiency, even if you find the sentiment distasteful.”

“I don’t find it distasteful.” He wasn’t entirely sure what he found it. “I am only… surprised. You’ve never spoken so before.”

“The circumstances of our… time together… were unique. I’ve had time, things are different now. I’ve never wanted anything so before.”

She looked back across the square, to the children and their nurses, and something in her face was unguarded again, hungry in a way that made Frederick’s chest tighten uncomfortably. She turned and looked at him, and for a moment, he felt she might return a bit of that hunger.

“It will be your turn soon enough, you know,” she said. “If Rachel marries this Season, every matchmaking mother in London will turn her sights on you next. You can only avoid it for so long. You’ll be hunted exactly as I mean to hunt.”

“I shall look forward to it with tremendous dread,” Frederick said, and was relieved when it won a real laugh out of her.

“You’ll survive it. You survive everything with that endless composure of yours.” She studied him a moment, head tilted, and there was something else assessing in the look, something he hadn’t seen from her before. “I daresay, you’ll have your pick.”

He didn’t know what to say to that either, and so, he said nothing. Frederick always found that easiest and yet, for a moment, they simply looked at each other. It was, in that moment, that Frederick saw something shift in Anna’s face.

A flicker of surprise, quickly masked.

She looked away first, a faint color climbing her throat that had nothing to do with the morning chill, and busied herself smoothing a wrinkle from her glove that did not exist.

“There you are!” Rachel reappeared in a swirl of skirts and good humor, oblivious, already pulling Anna by the hand. “You must come and see this silk, Anna, it is precisely the green speckles of your eyes. I told the woman I should have to drag you over to prove it?—”

And then she was gone again, towed away into the crowd, throwing one last unreadable glance back at Frederick over her shoulder before the press of people swallowed her from view.

Frederick was in a foul temper by the time he returned home, and he could not have said precisely why, only that the feeling sat in his chest like a stone he’d swallowed and couldn’t dislodge. He tossed his hat onto the hall table with more force than the hat had done anything to deserve and made for his study, where Percy was curled in the single patch of late sun on the windowsill.

The cat opened one eye, assessed him, and apparently found him acceptable. He uncurled himself, stretched at length, and dropped to the floor to wind himself around Frederick’s ankles. He purred with the loud, unbothered satisfaction of a creature who had never once in his life had to find himself a match.

A life of solitude was his future, only interacting with others as he saw fit.

“I think you have the right idea,” Frederick told him, and sank into his chair.

Percy took this as an invitation, leapt into his lap, and arranged himself. Frederick let his hand fall to the cat’s back without quite meaning to, stroking absently while his mind turned over the morning.

I want a baby.

He could not seem to dismiss the words, nor the picture they conjured. He could see Anna standing up at some ball in a fortnight’s time, smiling that same determined smile at some other man, some man with better prospects or better looks or simply better timing. He was unable to think of one single reason why the image should make him feel as though someone had reached into his chest and wrung something vital out of it.

I have come to London to find a husband.

He did not examine the feeling closely enough to name it, and willed the words to leave him be. He told himself it was only that he disliked change, that a year’s absence had made him unaccustomed to Anna’s straightforward manner, that any man would be put off his stride by such an announcement delivered without warning in the middle of a public market. It was the unexpected nature of it more than the words themselves.

He started to mentally list the correspondence he had to attend to that day, none of which made the stone in his chest any lighter. He grabbed a book and began to turn the pages, hoping they would absorb him. Percy, sensing perhaps that his attentions were not having their usual effect, headbutted Frederick’s hand insistently until he resumed petting in earnest. He stayed there, purring long after Frederick had stopped pretending to read and simply sat, staring at nothing, until the room had gone dim around him.

What a miserable sight it will be to have to watch her court other men, he finally admitted to himself and slammed the book.

He set it on a nearby table, and Percy looked up at him, wide-eyed and unfazed.

“It’s none of your business.”

He went up to bed still out of temper. He closed the curtains and lay a long while in the dark without sleeping, turning over a season that had not yet begun.

It already felt utterly unbearable.

CHAPTER 24