Page 85 of A Baby to Seal the Duke’s Fate

The house behind him was quiet. Cecily breathed softly against his coat. The other letter sat unopened on the desk beside the first.

At last he lowered the paper.

His hand remained on the edge of the desk while he looked, not at the letter, but somewhere past it, past the window, past the room itself.

A woman on a village green laughing at daisies with a baby on her lap.

That image came back to him first.

Not his mother’s warning, not the orphanage letter, not Isolde Carrington, already committed to a future he had not chosen.

Only Phoebe, sitting in the grass with Cecily and smiling at something the child had done.

Leopold closed his eyes briefly.

The worst part was not that Isolde was coming. It was knowing that Isolde was nothing like Phoebe, and realizing that bothered him deeply.

It was that he now knew exactly what he stood to lose.

Chapter 16

Honora heard about the day of Lady Isolde Carrington’s arrival from Martha the day after her outing to town with Leopold, mere hours before she was expected.

It was midmorning, and Cecily had just been put down for a nap after a difficult hour of chasing ribbons, a wooden spoon, and one of Honora’s gloves across the nursery floor. Honora had gone downstairs to fetch more hot water and found Martha in the kitchen with flour on her hands and a look that suggested she had news she did not quite approve of.

Martha did not bother with pleasantries.

“Lady Isolde Carrington is arriving this afternoon.”

Honora stopped at once. “She is?”

Martha nodded. “For a week.”

Honora set the basin down more carefully than necessary. “Why?”

Martha gave her a look. “Because Her Grace arranged it.”

Honora stared at her, choosing her words carefully.

“I recall,” she said. “I just did not expect her arrival so soon.”

Martha crossed her arms. “It is a courtship.”

The words landed harder than Honora expected.

She looked away at once, though there was nowhere in the kitchen to look that would make them easier to hear.

“A courtship,” she repeated, because the alternative was silence.

“That is what I said.”

Honora took a breath and let it out slowly. “I see.”

Martha’s face remained unreadable, but her gaze stayed on Honora long enough to make the meaning of it plain. That she was not asking whether Honora approved, or whether Honora had known, was plain; she was simply watching the way the news struck.

Honora should not have cared.

That much she knew, with the same part of herself that had been warning her for weeks that every soft feeling in Belgrave came with a cost and had no claim on Leopold. None at all. She had come here under a false name and lied to his face and meant, at the beginning, to steal her niece and disappear. Nothing in that history made room for heartbreak.