He would never be a father. He would never be a husband in any true sense. He would never love a child so much that its losscould hollow him out. He would never love a woman so much that grief might take her from him while she still breathed. He would never build a life upon tenderness when tenderness could be ripped away without warning and leave only silence behind.
Yet, here he was, with a child that slept upstairs beneath his roof and a wife who sat across from him with sunlight on her hair and marmalade on her lips. And his first thought had been to kiss her.
Andrew looked away. The movement was abrupt enough that Frances must have noticed. He reached for his knife, though there was nothing left upon his plate worth cutting. He forced his attention to the eggs, the toast, the coffee cooling beside him. Those were ordinary things. Those were manageable things, things that did not threaten to unmake vows sworn in childhood and hardened over twenty-one years.
“You have marmalade,” he told her, before he could stop himself.
Frances blinked. “What?”
He gestured vaguely to his own mouth, still not quite looking at hers. “There.”
Color rose swiftly in her cheeks. “Oh.”
She took up her napkin and dabbed at the corner of her lip. “There?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” She spoke more quietly than before.
Andrew lifted his coffee and took a drink, though it had gone lukewarm. Frances returned to her breakfast, but the earlier ease had altered. Something had passed between them, unnamed and uninvited, and now it sat at the table as surely as any guest at Pembroke’s house party would.
He opened his newspaper again. This time he did not pretend to read.
He stared at the printed page and saw only Frances’ lips, the cradle upstairs, and the long shadow of a promise he no longer trusted himself to keep.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“My dear Duchess, what an honor! What an absolute honor!” Lady Pembroke greeted Frances, who smiled with all the serenity expected of a woman being welcomed by people who would have been equally delighted to see her trip over the threshold.
“Lady Pembroke, you are too kind.”
“Nonsense. We are delighted. Are we not, my dear?”
Lord Pembroke, standing beside his wife with a smile polished to uselessness, bowed low. “Beyond delighted. Your Graces, you honor us.”
Andrew inclined his head. “You are gracious to invite us.”
His voice was perfectly calm and his posture relaxed enough to suggest he had not noticed the dozen curious gazes already fastened upon them from the great hall.
He noticed, of course. Frances knew because she noticed, too.
They had scarcely crossed the threshold, and already the house had gone strangely alert. Conversation continued, but with that particular rhythm of people trying very hard to sound as though they were not listening. A lady near the staircase tilted her head too far. Two young women standing beside a marble-topped table whispered with the speed of conspirators and the discretion of geese.
Frances kept her hand lightly upon Andrew’s arm.
United couple, she reminded herself.
Lady Pembroke’s smile widened. “You must be fatigued from the journey.”
“Not at all,” Frances replied. “The roads were very kind.”
“How fortunate. And how well you look, Duchess. Marriage agrees with you.”
There it was, the first dart, wrapped in silk.
Frances smiled more sweetly. “Does it? I shall have to inform marriage. I am sure it will be pleased.”
Andrew made the faintest sound beside her, enough to warm her more than it ought. Lady Pembroke blinked, then laughedas though Frances had been charming rather than mildly insubordinate.
