Page 2 of How Not to Marry a Duke

And her feet⁠—

Her feet were bare.

Pale and small against the grass, with a smudge of dirt across one arch that ought not to have made Frederick's chest constrict in the manner it did.

"Surrender, villain!" She lunged at the older child—Princess Charlotte, he recognised—with theatrical menace. "Or face the terrible tickle of doom!"

"Never!" Charlotte shrieked with delight, ducking behind a rosebush. "Pirates never surrender!"

The younger boy—Prince James, perhaps four years of age—seized upon the distraction to grasp the woman's knotted skirts. "Aunt Flor! Aunt Flor! I have captured the sea monster!"

"Treachery!" She clutched her heart with magnificent drama. "Betrayed by my own nephew! I am slain!"

She collapsed upon the grass with the children piling atop her, all three of them dissolving into laughter.

Frederick counted the gold threads in her hair.

Fourteen, he thought, before he could stop himself. Fourteen threads catching sunlight like spun treasure.

This was absurd. He did not count things about women. He was an engaged man. He was a duke. Dukes did not stand in gardens cataloguing the precise shade of a woman's hair whilst she was tickled by small children.

And yet here he stood, cataloguing.

Beside him, Edward made a strangled sound.

Frederick glanced over to find the King of England pinching the bridge of his nose, his expression caught somewhere between exasperation and mortification.

"Good God," Edward muttered, low enough that only Frederick could hear. "Wild spinsters. The palace is positively overrun with them."

"I beg your pardon?"

"My sister-in-law." Edward's jaw had tightened. "Who appears to have forgotten that she is a lady of six and twenty, not a child of six. And that we have guests. And that her—" He gestured vaguely at the spectacle before them, colour rising in his cheeks. "Her limbs are on display for all the world to observe."

Frederick found he could not breathe, though for entirely different reasons than Edward's discomfort.

Florinda.

He had thought of her, in those early years. The Marquess of Ashbourne's youngest daughter, possessed of sharp wit and a habit of saying precisely the wrong thing at precisely the right moment. She had been but seventeen the last occasion of their meeting—too young, far too young—and yet he had remembered her nonetheless.

The stable at Carthedge. A summer afternoon. She had marched in whilst he was examining a new foal and announced, with tremendous dignity, that she had come to conduct an experiment.

"I have made a list of one hundred and seven reasons why this is an extraordinarily bad idea," she had informed him. "None of them seemed sufficient."

And then—God help him—she had kissed him. For science, she had said. Scientific inquiry.

It had been awkward at first—noses bumping, angles wrong, nothing like the poetry she had apparently researched extensively. But then he had cupped her jaw, tilted her face, and for three seconds—perhaps four—the entire world had rearranged itself around the impossible fact of Florinda Ashbourne kissing him in a stable.

She had pulled back with flushed cheeks and said, "Well. That was most informative," and then she had fled. Actually fled, gathering her skirts and running as though pursued by wolves.

He had stood there like a fool, the foal nosing at his hand, his thoughts in absolute disarray.

He should have gone after her. Should have called on her before he left for war. He had told himself he was being noble—sparing her an attachment to a man who might not return. The truth was simpler and uglier: he had been afraid.

War had intervened. War, and cowardice dressed as duty, and the slow burial of want beneath the weight of what a duke ought to do.

Nine years.

Nine years, and she was still the most alive thing he had ever seen.