Page 94 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The square opened before him in lamplight and smoke. Jonathan was there, white-faced, shouting something he could not hear, and beyond him, against the iron railings, Alice stood with a boy in each arm.

Freddie saw him first. The sound that left the child was older than words, the cry of a boy who had spent everything he had on being brave. Kenneth crossed the distance between them without awareness of his feet or the cobblestones. When he reached them, he did not pause or speak or do any of the careful, measured things he had spent a lifetime perfecting.

He gathered all three of them into his arms and held on.

Alice’s face pressed into his neck, and her hand gripped the back of his coat. The boys were pressed between them, their small hands clutching at whatever they could reach.

Kenneth held it all: the weight and the warmth and the soot and the trembling and the absolute, ungovernable fact of them alive, here, and his. The walls he had built and fortified for thirty-three years did not hold.

He did not want them to.

Chapter Thirty

Alice could not recall who had sent for the physician.

Someone among the staff had managed it while the rest of them stood on the far pavement and watched the house burn.

The physician appeared out of the lamplight with his bag and his coat thrown over what was clearly nightclothes, sleep still creased into his face.

Kenneth would not release the boys.

She stood beside him on the pavement, the cold air brushing sweat-damp cotton and soot-streaked arms and the smoke-matted tangle of her hair. She was shaking. A fine persistent tremor that had begun in her hands and traveled to her shoulders and her jaw, which she could not will away.

Kenneth sat on a bench in the garden with Freddie on one knee and Charlie on the other, and the physician crouched before them with his instruments. Kenneth’s arms did not shift. When the physician asked to examine the boys more closely, Kenneth merely adjusted his hold to allow access. His body had decided what it was doing and would not be receiving suggestions.

Jonathan stood behind them, his cravat gone. At some point, he had draped a blanket around her shoulders. She had not thanked him for it. She would, when later became something she could manage.

Freddie was talking. He was explaining the fire to the physician, breathless, converting what had happened into a story he could hold in both hands and show to people. The smoke, the sound of the beams, the room, the man, the knife. His voice pitched higher each time the physician’s attention moved elsewhere, as though the audience was the purpose and its removal was the threat.

Charlie was silent. His head rested against Kenneth’s shoulder, his eyes were open, and his hand gripped the front of his father’s shirt so tight it did not look like it would relax any time soon.

Alice watched Kenneth’s thumb draw slow circles across Charlie’s back. His jaw was set, the tendons visible along his neck, and something in the rigidity told her the will keeping him upright would hold only if he did not examine it.

His eyes flicked to her. They had been flicking to her every few minutes since she came out of the house, and the look in them was always the same: something ungoverned that stayed a beat longer than necessity required and then pulled away. She felt the loss of it in her chest each time, as though the fire had burned through something between them without regard for whether either of them was prepared for what lay beneath.

The physician pronounced the boys sound. Smoke, some irritation, nothing that rest and clean air would not mend. Then he turned to Alice. She submitted to his examination and answered his questions without retaining one.

“Rest would serve them all, Your Grace. If there is somewhere nearby…”

“Brook Street.” Kenneth’s voice was hoarse, the smoke having stripped it to a roughness she registered not in her ears but lower, in the hollow at the base of her throat. “I will send word ahead.”

Jonathan was already moving toward the carriage.

Alice did not remember the drive. She remembered Charlie’s temple against her arm and Freddie’s head on her lap, his breathing settling slowly as the boy refuelled in the only way left to him.

The smoke lived in all of them now, in the cotton and the hair and the skin. She remembered Kenneth across from her in the dark carriage, watching the three of them, his face open in a way she had never seen it, as though something behind it had shifted and he could not get it back.

The house on Brook Street was smaller than Bearmoor House. The housekeeper met them at the door, took in the soot and the nightclothes and the sleeping children, and asked nothing.

“The rooms will be ready in ten minutes, Your Grace.” She turned, and the household moved around them quietly, responding to need without requiring it to be explained.

They carried the boys upstairs together. Neither discussed it. Kenneth held both twins against his chest, one in each arm, their weight familiar. Alice walked beside him up the narrow stairs and through the unfamiliar corridor. When he laid the boys on the bed, she was already there, pulling the coverlet up and tucking it beneath their chins. The gesture required nothing from her except the muscle and the memory.

Freddie’s eyes cracked open. He studied her face, fierce, compiling.

“You are staying,” he said.

“I am staying.”