Emmeline curled her fingers more tightly around the porcelain cup, though the tea had long since cooled enough that it no longer warmed her skin.
“I do not know,” she admitted.
Margaret’s brows lifted. “You must know something.”
Emmeline let out a quiet breath and looked down at the dark surface of her tea.
“I know that it is happening. I know that there is no longer any space left for imagining otherwise.” She gave a faint, humorless smile. “And I know that I have become rather attached to the idea of Aaron.”
That softened Margaret at once.
“Well,” she said, setting down her cup, “that I understand. He is a sweet child.”
“He is more than that.” Emmeline’s voice quieted, turning inward almost before she meant it to. “He is trying so hard all the time. Even when he says very little, one can feel how much he is holding, how carefully he has taught himself to move around his father’s temper and around his own grief.”
Margaret watched her closely now, no trace of teasing left.
“I keep thinking of him in that dining room,” Emmeline continued, her fingers tightening on the cup again. “How his face changed when his eyes filled with pain.”
The memory hit her with fresh force every time it returned. Something in the boy’s frightened instinct had gone straight to her heart. She had felt a small, sharp ache of wanting to protect a child, even though he was not yet hers.
“I think,” she said more slowly, “that I could love him very much.”
Margaret’s expression gentled. “I think you already do.”
Emmeline did not answer that.
Margaret let the silence last only so long before tilting her head. “And the Duke?”
Emmeline looked up at once. The Duke made clarity too difficult.
“What about him?” she asked and hated how evasive it sounded.
Margaret gave her a look so direct that Emmeline almost averted her eyes. “Do not do that. You know perfectly well what about him.”
Emmeline turned her gaze toward the window, where a lady in plum silk was just stepping from a carriage with enough care to suggest she believed the whole street watched her.
“I do not know what to make of him,” she said at last. “One moment he seems…”
She stopped.
Margaret leaned forward. “Seems what?”
Emmeline swallowed. “Strong,” she said quietly. “Decisive. Capable of making the whole room move around him without effort. And then the next moment he is with Aaron, and I see something in him that feels almost like fear, though he would never call it that.”
Margaret was silent, letting her go on.
“He unsettles me,” Emmeline admitted. “I feel… drawn to him, and I do not trust it. He can look at me and say very little, and somehow, I leave the exchange feeling as though I have revealed too much. And then there are times when he touches me, even by accident—” She stopped again, heat climbing under her skin.
Margaret’s eyes sharpened at once. “Yes?”
Emmeline gave a small shake of her head and forced herself onward. “I cannot seem to think properly around him. Not always.”
That, at least, made Margaret smile a little. “Which sounds to me like a man you are drawn to.”
“No,” Emmeline said quickly, and then quieter, “not only that.”
Because that was not the whole of it. If the Duke had merely been handsome, she might have managed the matter better. It was worse than that. It was the contradictions in him that caught at her. The man who could defend her in a ballroom without raising his voice. The man who could make her feel chosen inone moment and almost frozen out in the next. And beneath all of that?—
