Page 34 of How Not to Marry a Duke

Florinda looked up. His face was very close, his jaw tight with what might have been old hurt of his own.

"I am sorry," she said, and meant it—not just for herself, but for him, for the boy who had lost a friend the same year she had lost a brother.

"As am I."

Martha's footsteps on the stairs broke the moment. Frederick adjusted his grip and carried Florinda down the corridor to her chamber, the maid trailing behind them with the steady presence of propriety restored. He set her in the chair by the window. Straightened, stepped back, became again the composed Duke rather than the man who had held her on the landing.

Martha had already moved to the dressing table, busying herself with hairpins in the manner of a well-trained servant who had seen nothing and would remember less.

Frederick nodded once, a gesture that encompassed both farewell and something else she could not name. He turned toward the door.

"Your Grace."

He stopped.

"Thank you," Florinda said. "For the fish."

He understood. Of course he understood. "The fish was excellent," he said. "I shall ensure Cook knows her efforts were appreciated."

Then he was gone, and Florinda was alone with the ghost of her brother's name and the memory of Frederick's arms tightening around her on the twelfth stair.

She sat very still in the darkening room and did not cry.

She was an Ashbourne. Ashbournes did not cry over brothers who had abandoned them, or over dukes who noticed when they were hurting, or over any of the impossible things that had taken root in her heart during a fortnight of being carried up and down staircases.

She did not cry.

But when Martha came to help her undress, her eyes were red, and neither of them mentioned it.

Chapter Eleven

The Removal

The footmen came for her at half past nine.

Not Frederick. Footmen. Two of them, young and efficient, positioning themselves at the front and back of the wheeled chair with the careful coordination of men who had been given very specific instructions. They lifted her—chair and all—and carried her down the stairs whilst Florinda counted each step out of habit and tried not to think about whose arms should have been around her instead.

Fourteen stairs. She had counted them dozens of times over the past fortnight, held against him, close enough to feel his heartbeat through layers of wool and linen, close enough to breathe in sandalwood and soap and a warmth underneath that was simply him. Fourteen stairs that had become the most dangerous part of her day—and the part she had looked forward to most.

This morning, Frederick had not come.

He had not appeared at breakfast. He had not sent word. He had simply... not been there, and the footmen had arrived in his place, and Florinda had understood the message perfectly: too close. Too much. This must stop.

She had not expected it to hurt quite so much.

Four and a half weeks she had been at Carthedge Hall. The first fortnight confined to the blue guest chamber, seeing no one but Martha—whom Margot had dispatched from Ashbourne the moment she received word of the accident—and Lady Penelope, who visited daily with books and gossip and the particular kindness of a woman who understood confinement. The Dowager had looked in every other day, as propriety demanded of a hostess, her visits brief and coolly correct.

Frederick she had not seen at all during those first two weeks. There had been no reason for him to visit an invalid in her bedchamber. No excuse. No opportunity.

Then she had grown strong enough to be carried downstairs, and everything had become infinitely more complicated. Two and a half weeks of chess games and whist evenings and formal dinners. Two and a half weeks of being lifted and carried, of counting stairs, of conversations that said nothing and meant everything. Two and a half weeks for the gossip to spread from the Carthedge servants to the village to the surrounding estates.

And now, apparently, it was over. Whatever it had been.

The footmen deposited her in the morning room with professional care, bowed, and withdrew. Florinda sat in the thin winter sunlight and told herself the ache behind her ribs was merely the strain of being jostled about. Nothing more. Certainly nothing to do with the empty doorway where a duke should have been standing.

She had been staring at that doorway for perhaps ten minutes when she heard the carriage—the familiar rumble of wheels on the gravel drive, accompanied by the high, excited shriek of a child who had been confined to a vehicle for far too long.

Hope.