Page 33 of The Duke’s Matchmaker

“Don’t,” Dorothy complained. “Don’t look at each other as if I’m a problem you’re trying to decide how to solve. Do you think I don’t see it when you do that? Do you think I don’t understand what it means? You think you know better than I do, even though I’m the one who actually spends time with the duke. But you don’t know better. You don’t know what goes on between the two of us. You think you know everything, but you know nothing.”

“Dorothy, why would you speak to us like that?” Abigail sat back, a hand pressed to her heart. “You know that we only want to help you, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course I know,” Dorothy sighed. “But your expectations are too much for anyone to bear, Abigail. And Honora is worse. Why can’t the two of you accept things as they are? It’s awful for me the way you keep dreaming of something that’s never going to happen, because every day I feel as if I’m letting you down. Just accept that I’m not going to marry. I’m going to be a spinster, and what’s the harm in it? The three of us have one another. We have homes. We have enough money to get by. It won’t be a terrible life.”

“But Dorothy,” Honora said, her voice softening for the first time. “It’s not enough that your life not be terrible. We want you to have everything, don’t you understand that? We want you to have love in your life.”

Like you did, you mean?

She didn’t say it. It was much too cruel to say out loud. It was the one thing she would never say to her sisters. But the thought was never far from her mind, either.

They had both found love, as they wanted her to. They had both believed that happiness was in their grasp. And then, for both of them, it had gone away. It had been ripped from them violently by illness, which was something that could strike anyone at any time. You couldn’t do anything to ensure you would be safe from such a terrible tragedy.

The only way to keep from living through the grief her sisters had experienced was never to let herself fall in love at all. And that meant the life of a spinster, for she had no desire to enter into a loveless marriage.

Yes, it would be lonely. Yes, it might be hard. But it was as she had said. It wouldn’t be terrible.

Grieving the loss of a husband would be.

It still felt like a miracle sometimes that her sisters had come through that pain. It was still hard to believe that she had them back, and that they were happy more days than they were sad. She was grateful for it, but she was never, ever going to put herself in that position.

But she knew that was the one thing she could never say to them. They would try to argue with her. They’d try to convince her that she needed to give marriage a chance.

That argument wouldn’t be fair to anybody.

She wouldn’t put her sisters through that pain.

CHAPTER 18

“Dorothy, you must come downstairs at once!”

Dorothy set down the book she had been reading and frowned at Abigail, who had just poked her head into the upstairs sitting room. “Why?” she asked. “It’s not yet time for dinner.”

“No, but you have a visitor,” Abigail said.

Dorothy’s stomach flipped. Of course she had a visitor. The thought had not been far from her mind these past few days, though she had tried to forget it. Nathaniel had told her he would come to speak to her once Colin had recovered from his illness.

I’m excited because his presence here means that Colin is well, she told herself firmly. That’s the only reason it’s so thrilling to know he’s arrived.

In case she had it wrong, she asked her sister. “Is it the Duke of Henshaw?”

“It is!” Abigail’s excitement was more difficult to explain since she couldn’t have known of Colin’s illness. “I told you that he had taken an interest in you, didn’t I?”

Ah, there it was. Somehow, Dorothy had allowed herself to hope that her sisters might actually have believed her claim that there was nothing romantic between herself and the duke. It seemed that Abigail, at least, remained unconvinced, and this visit wasn’t going to help with that.

“I’d better go and see him,” Dorothy agreed. She could set her sister straight later.

She found Nathaniel in the downstairs sitting room waiting for her. He had been perched in an armchair, but he rose to his feet when she arrived. “Dorothy. How good to see you again.”

“Nathaniel,” she countered. “I trust…all is well?” Honora was also in the room, so she couldn’t clearly reference Colin’s illness without giving away that she knew more than she should.

He gave her a smile. “Everything is just fine,” he assured her.

The way her heart warmed at that smile—that was just because she was pleased to hear Colin was all right. It couldn’t be anything more than that. He was handsome when he smiled, though. She couldn’t help imagining a world in which her sisters’ ideas were correct and someone like this really had come to court her. Wouldn’t it be something to know that such a good looking man found me worthy of his time?

She pushed that aside. It wasn’t the right thing to focus on. He had come here for a different reason, and they needed to find a way to have the discussion they required without her sisters listening in.

Abigail came into the room. “Your Grace, it’s so kind of you to pay a visit to Dorothy,” she said. “I know the two of you didn’t get to spend as much time together as you might have liked at the dinner party the other night.”