She had not prepared for this. For the sight of the Duke of Rathbourne kneeling on a chapel floor, holding a rag doll, and handling it as though it were the most important object he had ever been given.
For one unguarded moment he did not look like the man who had ruined her life. He looked like a normal man, one who could be kind. Human. One who could care about a child, one who was worthy of being cared for.
She pressed her nails into her palms.Stop it. Stop it now.
The clergyman cleared his throat.
Tristan rose. Clara returned to Eleanor, apparently satisfied that the duke had been sufficiently inspected and found adequate. Adrian stepped forward, working rather hard to look composed.
The vows began.
Rosamund stood beside the man she was about to marry and listened to the clergyman’s words as though they were being spoken about someone else.Dearly beloved.She was not beloved.Joined together.She was being fastened, like a door to a frame, by the pressure of circumstance and the cold logic of a world that punished women for the sin of having no one left.For better, for worse.She could not imagine better. Worse, she knew intimately.
When her turn came, she spoke the words clearly. She had promised herself that much. She would not sound hesitant or broken. She would be strong. Her voice held. Her hands held. The chapel held its breath, and she saidI willwith the same steady precision she had used every morning for the past four years to tell Clara that everything would be all right.
Tristan spoke his vows with the deliberate gravity of a man signing a binding contract, each word weighted and measured and meant. His voice did not waver. His gaze did not leave her face. And when the clergyman asked for the ring, he produced it from his waistcoat pocket—a band of plain gold, unadorned, chosen with the same refusal of ostentation that governed everything about him—and slid it onto her finger with a touch so careful it might have been mistaken for tenderness by someone who did not know better.
She knew better.
The gold sat warm and foreign against her skin. She resisted the urge to twist it.
“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
The words fell into the chapel and settled like dust after a detonation. It was final.
Duchess of Rathbourne.The title closed over her like borrowed robes.
She turned from the altar. Tristan offered his arm. She took it because refusing would have required an explanation she did not have the resources to construct, and the stiffness of his forearm beneath her gloved fingers told her that he had expected refusal and had braced against it.
They walked the length of the aisle in silence. Eleanor followed with Clara, and Adrian brought up the rear, his footsteps easy and unhurried, as though he were leaving a luncheon rather than a wedding that had reshaped three lives in the space of a quarter-hour.
At the chapel door, Clara broke free of Eleanor’s hand again.
She did not run to Rosamund. She ran to Tristan.
Her small fingers reached up and closed around his—the hand that was not holding Rosamund’s arm, the one that hung at his side, unguarded. She gripped two of his fingers with unthinking possessiveness. As though this man, who was apparently feared by all but her, now belonged to her as much as the ragdoll.
Tristan’s stride broke. A single misstep, barely perceptible, like a clock losing a gear.
He looked down at the small hand wrapped around his fingers. Then he looked at Rosamund, and in his gaze she saw something she had never expected to see in the eyes of the man who had destroyed her world—the raw, exposed bewilderment of a man who had been chosen by a child and had no idea what to do with it.
He did not pull away.
Rosamund stared at their joined hands—Clara’s small fingers wrapped around the duke’s, trusting and absolute—and felt the ground shift beneath her. Marrying the duke was one thing. This… seeing him as so utterly human… was something she had not been prepared for in the slightest.
CHAPTER 8
“The nursery adjoins Her Grace’s chambers, Mrs Alcott. Not mine. The connecting door remains unlocked at all times. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, Your Grace.”
“Good.” Tristan pulled on his gloves without looking at the housekeeper, though Rosamund suspected he could feel the woman’s quiet assessment the way one felt weather shifting. “Fresh flowers in Her Grace’s sitting room. Something simple—not roses. Wildflowers, if they can be found. And for Clara’s room, whatever is brightest.”
Mrs Alcott inclined her head with the practised composure of a woman who had served the Rathbourne household for nineteen years and had learned to receive extraordinary instructions as though they were perfectly ordinary. She climbed the staircase swiftly, and the speed with which she moved suggested that even she understood this morning carried a weight the house had not felt in a very long time.
Rosamund stood in the vestibule and watched him work.
The carriage ride from the chapel had not been awkward. It had been something far worse: efficient. Tristan had arranged everything—the transfer of their belongings, the dispatch of a note ensuring Eleanor would remain for several days, a separate carriage for the trunk containing Clara’s things—with the ruthless competence that reminded her precisely why men feared him. He had understood, without being told, that the rag doll and the charcoal stubs and the single remaining storybook could not be trusted to arrive in a separate vehicle without the child believing they had been lost forever.
