Page 20 of Bred By the Duke

Cassia sniffles into her sleeve.

“You're in love with my brother.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I'm getting there at an alarming speed.” “Which is why I'm going to say the next bit properly, and I want you to actually hear it, and then I want you to take some time and not answer me by the end of the day.”

She sits up. Her face is a mess but she is still so vibrant and beautiful it makes me chest ache.

“If you don't want this,” I say, “I'll stop. I'm not going to pretend that it would be easy, because it wouldn't be. I'd probably be unbearable about it for a good while. But you were my friend first. You've been my friend since we were nineteen and you'd never used a launderette or cooked a potato.” Cassia makes a noise. “I'm serious. If you tell me you can't have your best friend and your brother together, I'll stop. But I'd need you to be okay with never seeing me in this house again, because I can't do the version where I come at Christmas and eat goose opposite him for the next thirty years. I've tried it. It's horrible.”

Cassia stares at me.

Then she says, with enormous scorn, “You absolute idiot.”

I bow my head. “That's not one of the two options.”

“He's been unbearable for four years.” She's laughing and crying at once. “And now I know why. Do you know what he's like? Do you know what it's like having any kind of function with him? He sits in the library like a Victorian ghost.” She grabs my hand hard enough to hurt. “You're not allowed to give him up for me, that's the stupidest thing anybody's ever said to me. I'd have been okay with it. If I'd been asked, four years ago, I'd have said get on with it, just don’t tell me the details.” She shudders.

We sit there a bit longer. She puts her head on my shoulder and tells me the runt has a white foot, and that Theo has rewritten his speech again, and that she doesn't care where anybody sits anymore, and would I mind terribly if she went and shouted at her mother a second time.

“Does she really think I’m a gold digger?” I ask, scrunching my face in disgust. “Because seriously I’d rather be a celibate spinster for the rest of my life than know someone thinks that of me…”

“She knows you’re not,” Cassia says. “She was probably just shocked.”

We hear the car while we're coming back up through the beeches. It comes around the front and stops with that expensive crunch beneath the tyres, and Sanderson gets out. Delphine Corvain gets out of the back once he has opened her door for her, and stands looking up at the west face of the house with her sunglasses pushed into her hair.

She's lovely. Beautiful even, and yet when I look at her, I don’t feel anything. I thought I might be insecure or jealous. But I’m just happy my best friend is okay.

“Right,” Cassia says, wiping her face on her sleeve one last time. “Watch this.”

She goes down the steps at a jog with her arms already out and her voice at full carrying volume, and inside of thirty seconds she has Delphine by the elbow, has told her she looks divine, has apologized for the state of everything, and is walking her toward the house. She says something about the puppies and Delphine laughs lightly.

The chairs come at twenty past one. Barry's men bring them down from the fountain in stacks of six on a sack truck, and I take the last of them by hand because the truck can't do the step at the bottom of the terrace and I'd rather move a chair than stand still.

I'm halfway across the grass with one under each arm when Vivienne says my name.

She's on the gravel path, her hands folded in front of her, and she looks, for the first time since I've known her, like a woman who has had to walk somewhere on purpose.

“Miss Gallacher. Might I have a moment.” I cringe internally at the use of my title and surname again. She was fine calling me Rochelle before this morning. Now I feel like she is reminding me that I’m a nobody.

I put the chairs down and turn to her.

“I was unforgivably rude to you this morning,” she says. “In my own dining room, in front of my family, to a guest. My daughter has since explained her feelings on the subject at some length and with a great deal of volume, and she was right.” Her chin lifts a fraction. “That is not why I'm here. I would have come anyway. It might have taken me until this evening.”

“Lady Vivienne.”

She shakes her hands, “Let me finish, please.” She looks past me at the marquee for a second. “You have been coming to this house for seven years. You sat up with Cassia the entire night before her father's funeral and you didn’t come down to breakfast, which meant nobody had to be brave in front of you. You have never once asked me for anything. Not an introduction, not a weekend, not a name. I knew that this morning, and I said what I said regardless, because I was frightened. I was frightened for Lucas but I was also frightened for you. But then you’ve been part of our lives for long enough now to know what it would mean to be Lucas’s wife.” She stops. “That is the whole of it. I would like you to forgive me. I'm aware I haven't given you a reason to.”

The marquee canvas cracks in the breeze behind me. A hundred and sixty chairs are stacked in the grass, and there's a woman in front of me who has apologized perhaps four times in her life.

“I forgive you,” I say. “I'd like it on the record that it was a horrible thing to say.”

“It was a horrible thing to say.”

“Then we're square.”

She inclines her head, which I suspect is as close as she comes to relief. Then she looks down at the two chairs sitting on the grass between us, and she does a thing I will be telling people about for the rest of my life. She bends, takes hold of the one nearest her by the back rail, and lifts it.

“Well,” she says. “Where are they going?”