Page 6 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“When the child was born—a girl—Nell’s health quickly deteriorated. There was nothing to be done. Before she died, she made me promise that her daughter would never be alone and would always be loved. I gave my word.” Louisa lifted her chin. “I have kept it. I intend to go on keeping it, whatever it costs me.”

“That is no small promise to make to a dying woman.”

“No, it is not.” She held his gaze. “But I made it, and I do not go back on my word, Your Grace, whatever inconvenience it causes. My father would prefer I did. He has pointed out, at some length, that an unmarried woman raising another woman’s child will find herself and the child both subject to a great deal of unkindness, and he is not wrong. I need a husband. Not for love, I would like to clarify, since I imagine you are already forming opinions about a woman who arrives at a duke’s study discussing marriage within the first quarter hour of meeting him.”

“I had begun to wonder where this was heading,” he admitted. “I confess I had not guessed correctly.”

“I do not require love, Your Grace. I require a name for Eleanor and a household in which no one will ask me to give her up or send her away, and I have no intention of finding either through the usual channels, since most gentlemen of my acquaintance are considerably more interested in my dowry than my opinions, and rather less interested still in inheriting another woman’s child along with a wife.” She said it without bitterness, simply as fact. “So I will tell you plainly what I told myself before I wrote back to you. If you want my help with Kit, truly want it, not as an experiment to be abandoned in a fortnight when it proves inconvenient, then marriage is what I require in return. Nothing more sentimental than that. A practical arrangement, built on mutual respect, in which you never ask me to give up the child I have sworn to protect, and I never ask more of you than you are willing to give.”

The study went quiet.

Say something, she thought, watching him, refusing to let the silence unsettle her outwardly, whatever it was doing beneath her ribs. Call me mad. Call me forward. Show me the door and be done with it, and I will have my answer and go home and think of another way to keep my word to Nell.

He did none of those things. He only studied her, that same complete, unhurried attention, as though she were a ledger he was determined to balance correctly before committing to a figure.

“You want me to marry you,” he said slowly, “in exchange for your help with my ward.”

“I want a great many things less than I want to keep my promise to Nell, Your Grace, and marriage happens to be the most efficient means of doing so. You require someone Kit will trust. I require a husband who will not trouble himself over a child who is not his own by blood. It seemed, when I considered it, a reasonably fair exchange.”

“Fair.” His voice was quieter, more careful. “I hope you are aware of what you are asking. Marriage is not a business arrangement one dissolves when it grows inconvenient.”

“I am entirely aware of what marriage is, Your Grace. I have refused four proposals already, from men who wanted a wife considerably quieter than I am inclined to be. I am not asking you for a love match. I am asking for a name, a household, and your word that Eleanor will never be treated as anything less than family under your roof. In return, I will do everything in my power to reach Kit, and I do not offer that lightly, because I do not know that I will succeed. I only know that I am willing to try properly, for as long as it takes, which is more than I understand anyone else has offered you.”

He studied her a moment longer, and she made herself hold still under his gaze, chin level, hands folded, refusing to let him see how much the stillness cost her.

“That is impossible,” he said.

CHAPTER 4

“Impossible,” Julian said again, as though repeating it might make the word sit more easily in the room. “I had hoped to employ you, Lady Louisa. A position in my household, well compensated, for as long as it took you to reach Kit. That was what I intended to offer.”

“Employment.” Louisa’s chin tilted, as though considering the word. “And where would you have me live while employed, Your Grace?”

“Here, naturally. It would hardly serve if you traveled from Henswick House each morning. Kit requires consistency.”

“An unmarried woman, residing under a bachelor’s roof, unchaperoned.” She said it plainly, without any heat, which somehow made the observation land harder than if she’d delivered it as an accusation. “I wonder how long it would take the ton to decide precisely what sort of position I held here.”

Julian’s jaw tightened. He had, in the two days since her letter arrived, turned this precise problem over more times than he cared to admit, and had arrived each time at no better solution than the one he had just offered and watched dismantled in a single sentence.

“A companion, then. Some older woman to lend the arrangement propriety.”

“And my daughter?” The words came out of her without hesitation, without the faintest flicker of correction. “Do I bring an infant into your household as governess and hope no one asks whose she is? Or do I leave her behind at Henswick House, in the care of servants? I have already told you, Your Grace. I do not intend to be parted from her. Not for a position, not for wages, not for any arrangement that requires me to set my promise down and pick up something more convenient in its place.”

“You are asking me to reconsider the entire architecture of my household on the strength of one afternoon’s conversation.”

“I am asking you to notice that the architecture you proposed was never going to hold, Your Grace, whether I pointed it out to you today or you discovered it yourself in a fortnight, when your housekeeper begins fielding questions from the servants about the baby in the east wing and the unmarried woman who claims her.” Louisa did not raise her voice. She did not need to. “I would rather you hear it plainly now than watch it collapse later, at greater cost to us both.”

Julian said nothing for a moment. He found that he believed her entirely, and the certainty of it was somehow more unsettling than if he’d suspected her of exaggeration.

She is not asking prettily. She is stating terms, the way I would state terms to a man across a negotiating table, and she has not once flinched from the fact that I might simply refuse and have done with her.

It was, he noted distantly, difficult to keep his attention where it belonged while she spoke.

She was a handsome woman, more than handsome, dark auburn hair coming loose at her temple from the speed of her arrival, hazel eyes that held his without once dropping away in the deference he was accustomed to receiving, a mouth that seemed built for exactly the kind of argument she was presently winning.

He was a man, whatever his reputation for coldness, and he was not blind to it. He simply had the sense, immediately and firmly, to set the observation aside as irrelevant to the matter at hand. Beauty was common enough in London drawing rooms.

Whatever this woman possessed, sitting across from him with her spine straight and her terms laid out like a solicitor’s brief, was considerably rarer, and considerably more dangerous to a man who had spent three years successfully wanting nothing from anyone.