“Lucien didn’t tell you?” Cassandra asked.
Grace looked at Lucien. His beloved face was frighteningly still, emotions hidden beneath that mask of ice. “Tell me what?” she asked.
“My dear sister-in-law. Surely, you know about the rift between Jane, Lucien and me?”
“Yes. But, painful as it was, you were children then. You have all grown and changed. After so many years you can put it to rest.”
“People do not change,” Cassandra said, lifting her chin. “Not at the core of them.”
Grace thought of the difference between the man she had first met at the lake and the man who had carried Sibby Rose into the room in Seven Dials, the man who’d let Scrap play with his pocket watch. The man who made love so tenderly and whose child now grew within her. “Peoplecanchange,” she insisted. She had to believe that. More than ever right now. “If they choose.”
Cassandra crossed her arms over her chest. “Lucien and I cannot. We have dealt with the gulf between us in the only way possible. Hence his promise to me, before you wed.”
A grim look hardened Cassandra’s face, and Grace felt a creeping dread. She looked at Lucien, his eyes that could be so tender, so heated with passion suddenly stark, unfathomable.
“Lucien…?” The moment his name left Grace’s lips, she saw the barriers form between them. “What promise is she talking about?”
“I vowed that I would never live at Everdene Hall again.”
CHAPTER 32
Grace stared at Lucien, feeling as if the floor had crumbled beneath her feet. The future she had dared to imagine as she and her husband grew closer shattered: summers at Everdene and The Willows, a little boy with Lucien’s ice-blue eyes and a daughter with his smile splashing in the lake with their cousin Kit, driving the wicker pony cart, playing hide and seek in the ballroom where she and Lucien had once had dancing lessons. He had crushed her dreams before ever placing his wedding ring onto her finger. She just hadn’t known it.
Cassandra broke in brightly. “Lucien has a lovely estate in Lancashire. I am sure you will be happy there.”
“Lancashire…,” she echoed, her gaze holding Lucien’s. “So far north it is almost to Scotland.”
When were you going to tell me?she wanted to rail at him.
She felt like a fool. She had seen the expressions on the family’s faces in that terrible moment she’d learned the truth. Jane stricken, Penelope shocked and desperately groping for something to say. Simon glared at Cassandra, who suddenly seemed smaller, as she had the moment after she’d snapped back into herself after wounding Lucien with the fencing foil. Her hand betrayed the slightest tremor.
Was she enjoying the discord she had wrought? Or was some part of her regretting it?
Grace saw Lucien regarding her with a somber gaze and wasn’t sure who she was angriest at. Through his silence, he had opened her up to this humiliation, left her defenseless.
She needed to be alone, but she wouldn’t give Cassandra the satisfaction of excusing herself.
Instead, she went to fetch a large work basket she always kept at the ready, determined to keep her hands busy as the Harcourts attempted to make awkward conversation.
“What are you working on?” Penelope asked with a kind of desperate cheerfulness.
“I am making Christmas gifts for the factory children who go to our school on Sunday.”
“Perhaps we could help while the men discuss business,” Penelope offered. “I know Simon had some questions about the estate he wanted to ask Lucien.”
“Of course,” Grace said as Lucien gave her one last, heavy look, then left the room with his brother.
As she laid the pieces of the project out on the table, Penelope murmured, “I am so…so…sorry. I had no idea what Cassandra planned.”
Grace forced back tears. “I suppose I was looking forward to more time with my family so near Everdene. I thought…”
What? That she could change Lucien? That there was some sort of miracle unfolding between them and she understood Lucien better than the family that had known him all his life?
But they’d known himbefore, a stubborn voice insisted inside her. He had made that promise to CassandrabeforeSibby Rose and the riot.Beforehe had begun spending entire nights in Grace’s bed,beforeshe’d awakened to that awed expression on his face…before she’d felt the spark of new life inside her. A wave of fierce protectiveness overwhelmed her.
What was real? What was not?
And what would happen when she told Lucien that she was carrying his child?
