“Yes, please, I would.” She had never been able to resist shaved ice.
He had already gone which she might have known he would do. He didn’t ask what flavor. She stood with the pram and watched David, who was staring at a parrot.
“It is you, is it not? You! You there.”
Clara turned. Coming toward her, with an expression of barely suppressed excitement that she recognized immediately, was Miss Dorothea Finch—Dottie Finch as she had been at Mrs. Allenby’s finishing school, who had always been the first to know everything and the last to stop talking about it.
“That was the Duke of Lynden, was it not? So you are Lady Lynden,” Dottie said, reaching her and grasping both her hands before Clara had quite consented to it. “So it is true. You really are the Duchess of Lynden, with a baby and everything. You have absolutely astonished everybody.”
“It was not our intention to astonish anyone,” Clara said pleasantly. “We were simply being a little private for a time. I’m sure you understand.”
“Private,” Dottie repeated, with the tone of someone for whom that concept held a faint but detectable whiff of suspicion. “I suppose. It is only…” she leant in, her voice dropping to a register that was somehow louder than her normal one, “… it is only that we all thought you so terribly in love with Benjamin not so very long ago. And then, of course, there was the business with His Grace Lynden himself and Miss—well, that other business. It does make one wonder,” she added with a bright, merciless smile, “whether this wasn’t perhaps rather a sudden sort of arrangement. A rebound, some might say.”
Clara held her gaze with perfect composure. “How kind of people to take such an interest,” she said. “As for sudden, I think you will find that the happiest marriages are often the ones that surprise everyone, including the parties involved.” She smiled. “Now if you’ll excuse me —”
“Here.”
Julian had appeared at her elbow, silent as smoke, and was holding out an ice. Coconut. Her favorite. He had remembered. Again.
He looked at Dottie Finch with an expression of easy, pleasant authority. “Miss?—?”
“Finch,” Dottie supplied, visibly flustered by his sudden presence. “Dorothea Finch. Clara and I went to finishing school together.”
“How delightful,” he said, with a smile that was perfectly, disarmingly warm. “I hope you will come to our ball. We are looking forward enormously to celebrating properly with all our friends. It is two Saturdays from now.” He tucked Clara’s free hand into his arm. “Do excuse us.”
They walked away together, and Clara kept her eyes forward until she was quite certain Dottie Finch was out of earshot.
“She said it was a rebound,” Clara said quietly.
“I know. I heard.” He glanced down. “Are you all right?”
“I am. But do you think that is what everyone will say?”
He shrugged. “If they do, then it works in our favor. Especially if we decide to part ways.”
She looked up at him, her throat tight. She hadn’t thought about the end of their arrangement, not truly. Not while they were still so involved in it all.
They found a bench beneath a chestnut tree near the monkey enclosure where David could watch the creatures. Julian settled the baby against his arm. David curled his fist around Julian’s finger. The way Julian smiled at that made her heart warm, butshe reminded herself that such feelings had no place in their arrangement.
“Can I ask you something?” Clara asked. She didn’t want to, but Dottie’s words were bothering her.
“You may ask me anything.”
She hesitated. “Josephine.”
He was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortably so but in the way of someone choosing their words with care.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Did you love her?”
He rocked David gently, his gaze resting somewhere in the middle distance. “I believed that I did,” he said at last. “At the time, I was quite convinced of it. But when I examine it now, honestly—I think I was more in love with an idea than with her.” He paused. “Do you remember what you said at breakfast about your wedding? How the plans had been built around everyone else’s wishes until almost nothing of it was actually yours?”
“Yes.”
“It was something like that, I think. She was a blank canvas upon which I had painted everything I thought I wanted. She wasdoing very much the same thing to me—painting her picture of what a duke ought to be. We were both deeply in love with our own paintings.” He glanced at her. “So no, I don’t think I actually loved her. Not really. Why do you ask?”
“No particular reason,” she said which was not entirely true. The real reason was standing twenty paces away in the form of Dottie Finch’s parting shot, still rattling around in her chest. But knowing he had not loved Josephine settled something in her, and she did not wish to look at that too closely either.
