Page 98 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

For the first time in her marriage, she slept beside her husband, and the sleep carried no dreams.

Epilogue

SIX MONTHS LATER

The cottage had a pear tree.

Kenneth noticed it as the carriage rounded the final bend of the lane, a young thing planted close to the front wall where it would catch the southern light, its branches already thick with the clustered blossoms of mid-April.

George Mercer stood beneath it with his sleeves rolled to the elbows and his collar loosened.

“They’re here!”

Freddie had the carriage door open before the wheels stopped.

“Mama, come look, they’ve got a pond!”

Kenneth watched Alice gather her skirts and step down from the carriage, watched the small unconscious turn of her mouth when Freddie’s hand found hers and pulled.

The warmth that spread through his chest was not the restless heat of the first months, but something steadier, something that had found its bearings and was no longer asking permission to exist.

Rachel met them at the door. Alice crossed the threshold and reached for her sister, and Kenneth hung back, because the reunion required nothing from him except his absence from the center of it.

He watched Alice’s hand come to rest on the baby’s head, watched her face soften when Rachel shifted the bundle into her arms.

“Sebastian,” Rachel said. “After Bach. George refused to consider anything less canonical.”

“I suggested Handel,” George offered from the doorway, where he was gripping Freddie by the collar. “She overruled me. She overrules me on most things. I gather it’s the natural order.”

“It is,” Alice said, without looking up from the baby’s face.

Charlie had come to stand beside Kenneth. He studied the infant with the measured scrutiny he applied to all subjects warranting proper examination.

“He’s very small,” he noted.

“You were smaller,” Kenneth told him.

Charlie looked up. His green eyes held a question he did not ask.

Kenneth placed his hand on his son’s shoulder and left it there. The weight of his palm on the small bones beneath was answer enough.

“Come,” Rachel urged. “Sebastian could use some fresh air. Let us have tea in the garden.”

They had barely reached the steps when a carriage stopped in front of the gate.

Lord Peltbury climbed down with the stiff, uncertain movements of a man arriving at a place he had not been invited to for a long time and was no longer sure of the protocol. He carried a parcel. It was wrapped badly, the paper creased where his grip had tightened, and the sight of it, the plain effort of a man who had never purchased a gift for a grandchild and had clearly attempted it without assistance, settled something in Kenneth’s chest that he had not expected to settle.

He watched Alice rise from the table. Watched Rachel’s face move through surprise and wariness and then something more cautious than either, the guarded willingness of a daughter who had been hurt and had not yet decided whether the hand being extended was the same one that struck.

“I have been a poor father.” Peltbury addressed neither daughter and both. The parcel hung at his side. “These months without you have made that difficult to ignore.” His jaw worked once, a motion Kenneth recognized. The recognition carried its own weight, because he understood what it cost a man to stand in a garden and admit that the structure he had built his authority upon was the thing that had cost him everything worth having. “I should like to make amends. If you will permit it.”

Rachel looked at Alice. Alice looked at Kenneth, a glance so brief it would have been invisible to anyone who had not spent months learning to read her. What he read was not a request for guidance, but confirmation that the decision she had already made was the right one.

“Then sit down,” Alice said to her father. “You are just in time for tea.”

It was not forgiveness, but a beginning nonetheless.

She pulled a chair to the table, and her father sat in it. Rachel placed Sebastian in his arms carefully.