“…Everyone wants something from him. His staff. His tenants. His peers. Me. Even Tremaine, his brother. He cannot conceive of a world where there is someone who just wants…”
Fleur shook her head.
“No.” She wantedeverythingfrom him: his heart, his body, his name. “I wanted to—needed to speak with you.”
Her speech faltered. But how to start? What to say?
She gave him a tender smile. “I have something I need to share. I’ve needed to for a long time. I don’t really know how or where or…”
He was once impatient with her prattling. Now, he had become her friend, free and without censure. She searched for that kindness, desperate to see her friend—not the cold duke merely tolerating her for his brother’s sake.
It would be a great deal easier to share what was in her heart if he behaved like he had one.
Instead, she was met with a cold, detached stranger. Fleur caught herself fisting and un-fisting her lace-overlay satin skirts. To still her worrying hands, she laid them upon her once perfectly flat belly. That fluttering feeling she had felt for months appeared under her hand.
Fleur stilled. Her troubled thoughts about Henry scattered.
A babe.
Her and Henry’s babe.
Awed by the slight movement, she lifted joyful eyes to Henry. She wanted to share this moment with him.
He directed his gaze to the place where she cradled herself. His eyes narrowed.
Her stomach gave a nauseating jolt—one that had nothing to do with her child.
Fleur dropped her arms quickly.
She searched for warmth but instead felt a chill settle, her initial hope now overtaken by disappointment.
What accounted for this coldness? She needed him to be tender, protective, and loyal. Not the imperious, condescending duke. Maybe he didn’t know she needed tenderness. He should have sensed it—especially after yesterday when she exposed her secrets and he promised to help her.
A night’s reflection appeared to have reawakened his disdain. It had strengthened his conviction of her unworthiness. She had been foolish to believe he would embrace her love. Not with his future duchess, Lady Angela, beside him.
Cowardice slipped back in. Fleur eyed the door for a long moment.
“You cannot undo in mere weeks what the last duke took thirty years to build.”
The whisper of Kilmartin’s reminder was the only thing keeping her in place.
Her earnest hope for a life with Henry and their child rested on her words now.
“There is so much to say, I don’t even know where to start,” she murmured.
Always at the beginning—the McQuoid beginning.
He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. Fleur hugged herself and stared past him.
“My family’s tradition of marriages built on love comes from centuries ago. There was a fateful encounter at the Fairy Pools that united a McQuoid lass and a lad from opposing sides of a bitter family feud. They fell deeply in love. The McQuoid lass sneaked out to handfast themselves, but the McQuoids were waiting. They captured Lord John, imprisoning him in a tower. She defied her family and everything to be with him. She leaped some six feet from her tower to Lord John’s to b-be…”
Henry withdrew his watch fob and consulted the timepiece.
Fleur stumbled in her telling.
“Madam, I have an assembly awaiting my return,” he said, tucking that gold heirloom back inside his jacket.
Humiliated, heat spilled along her neck and cheeks. “Y-Yes, of course.”
