“Miss Everleigh.”
She stopped. She did not turn.
His voice reached her from across the room—steady, controlled, stripped of everything except the words themselves. “Bring whatever matters to her. Toys. Books. Whatever she needs. There will be room.”
She did not answer. She could not. Because the instruction was not about logistics or space or the practical arrangement of a child’s belongings in a vast and unfamiliar house. It was about Clara. About a man who had just secured a wife who despised him and whose first thought, before the door had closed, was that a six-year-old girl should not arrive in a strange new life without the things that made the world feel safe.
Rosamund opened the door. She stepped into the corridor. She walked the length of that immense, silent hallway with her chin lifted and her spine straight and her hands buried in the folds of her cloak, where no one could see that they had not stopped trembling since the moment he stood close enough for her to feel the heat of him through the cold morning air.
The butler showed her out. The front door closed behind her with the kind of heavy, final sound that large houses produced—the sound of a world sealing itself shut.
She stood on the steps of Rath House, and London roared around her—carts and horses and the ten thousand small transactions of a city that had no interest in the fact that a woman in a mended cloak had just agreed to marry a duke—and she pressed the licence flat against her ribs and breathed.
Three days.
In three days, she would be the Duchess of Rathbourne. She would carry the name of the man who had signed the papers that destroyed her father. She would eat at his table, sleep beneath his roof, raise her sister within walls built by a fortune she had every reason to despise.
And she would do it without flinching.
She descended the steps. The morning air hit her face—sharp, carrying the first bite of a season that had not yet decided whether it intended to be kind—and she turned toward home, toward Clara, toward the three days that remained of the life she had known, carrying a document against her chest that felt less like a licence and more like a door swinging open onto a corridor she could not yet see the end of.
Behind her, on the second floor of Rath House, a curtain moved. Then settled.
She did not look back.
CHAPTER 5
“You are aware that standing at a window and watching a woman walk away does not technically constitute a courtship.”
Tristan released the curtain. The fabric fell back into place with a whisper that sounded, to his own ears, like an accusation.
Adrian Beaumont occupied the leather chair nearest the library fire with the proprietary ease of a man who had claimed that seat at the age of fourteen and saw no reason to relinquish it simply because the house had changed hands twice since. He had one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, a glass of Tristan’s brandy balanced on the armrest, and an expression of mild, lethal interest that Tristan recognised from a lifetime of being subjected to it.
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to watch you pace the length of this room four times, pour a drink you have not touched, and then abandon all pretence by posting yourself at the window like a particularly well-dressed sentry.” Adrian lifted the brandy and examined it against the firelight. “Your housekeeper let me in. Mrs Alcott remains, I think, the only person in this household who has ever been genuinely pleased to see me. She offered me biscuits.”
“She offers everyone biscuits. It is not a personal distinction.”
“She offered me thegoodbiscuits. The ones with almonds.” Adrian took an unhurried sip. “I choose to interpret that as affection. Now. Do sit down. You are making the furniture anxious.”
Tristan did not sit. He moved from the window to the mantel, where he rested one hand against the cold marble and stared into a fire that was doing its job competently and requiring nothing of him. The study still held the faintest trace of her—not a scent, nothing so tangible, but a disturbance in the room’s atmosphere, as though the air had not yet finished rearranging itself around the space she had occupied.
He had watched her descend the front steps. Had stood behind the curtain like a man without the courage to be seen and watched her pause on the pavement, press a hand to her ribs where the licence rested, and breathe. She had not looked back. He had not expected her to. But he had remained at the window long after the street had absorbed her, because the alternative was turning around and confronting the magnitude of what he had just set into motion.
“Adrian.”
“Tristan.”
“I have done something.”
“Yes, I gathered that from the general atmosphere of impending catastrophe.” Adrian set his glass down and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and his face lost the amusement it had been wearing like a costume. Underneath it was something sharper and considerably more attentive. “Your steward informed me—with a discretion that bordered on the theatrical—that a young lady had called this morning. A young lady who departed looking rather as though she had swallowed a live coal and was determined not to let anyone see it burning.” He paused. “I took the liberty of glancing at the visitors’ ledger on my way past.Miss Rosamund Everleigh.”
The name landed in the room and sat there.
“So,” Adrian continued, with the careful deliberation of a man dismantling something that might detonate, “would you care to explain why the daughter of the man whose life you destroyed has just left your house looking like she agreed to something she would rather have died than accept?”
Tristan turned from the fire. He met his cousin’s gaze squarely, because Adrian deserved that much—had always deserved it, had earned it through twenty years of showing up in rooms where Tristan was at his worst and refusing to leave.
