Page 23 of A Duchess for his Family

Their little faces fell with such practiced courage that Sophia felt something inside her give way. She looked at Benedict. He was watching the children, not her, and for once his guard slipped. The fear was there again, stark beneath the discipline: fear for them, fear of asking too much, and perhaps fear that he offered Sophia not a future but a burden no woman should be expected to take up.

Then his eyes met hers. Sophia’s heart beat once, hard and clear. She spent her whole life believing herself easily overlooked. Yet here were two children who looked at her and saw someone worth keeping. Here was a man who, in his severe and impossible manner, trusted her with the tenderest part of his life.

She could not walk away from them.

Before she could think better of it, before caution returned with its endless list of sensible objections, Sophia turned fully toward the duke.

“I accept,” she said.

The word was soft, almost lost. A stillness passed over him, deeper than surprise. Her mother made a small sound behind her.

“You do?”

Sophia drew a breath. Her hands trembled, so she clasped them together. “Yes, Your Grace. I will marry you.”

For one suspended moment, no one moved.

Then Marjorie gasped. “Truly?”

Amelia’s eyes filled with sudden tears. “You will stay… with us?”

Sophia looked down at them, and whatever fear remained was washed through by tenderness. “If your uncle still wishes it.”

Benedict stepped forward. “He does.”

The simplicity of it struck her more than any grand declaration could have done. Marjorie flung herself at Sophia with such force that Sophia nearly lost her balance. Amelia followed more gently, pressing close against her side as though afraid to ask for too much and unable to resist asking for some. Sophia bent over them both, her cheek brushing Amelia’s hair, her hand settling against Marjorie’s back.

She had accepted a duke.

She had agreed to become a duchess.

She had chosen a life she did not understand.

Yet in that moment, with two little girls clinging to her as if she opened a door they believed was closed forever, Sophia felt none of the triumph her mother surely imagined and none of the fear she expected. She felt only the quiet, trembling weight of being wanted.

Across the room, Benedict bowed his head. It might have been gratitude. It might have been relief. Sophia could not know.

But when he lifted his eyes again, they were fixed upon her with such grave intensity that she understood that her answer had not only changed the children’s lives. It had changed his.

And perhaps, most bewildering of all, it had changed hers, too.

Chapter Seven

Benedict had never considered Hyde Park a place of danger, although not because danger could not exist there. Horses bolted. Carriages overturned. Gentlemen rode too quickly to impress ladies. Children chased hoops without regard for wheels, hooves, or ducal nerves. But such dangers were visible, measurable, and therefore manageable.

Society’s curiosity, however, was another matter. It moved like smoke.

From the moment he and Miss Norton entered the park as an officially engaged couple, Benedict observed the whispers begin. Heads turned behind bonnets. Fans lifted. Gentlemen paused mid-conversation. Ladies sitting in open carriages lowered their voices while making no serious attempt to conceal that they were looking directly at him and his future duchess.

Sophia noticed all of it.

She walked at his side, her gloved hand resting lightly on his arm, the contact proper and modest, yet strangely distracting. Her maid, Jenny, followed several paces behind, at a distance suitable to propriety and close enough to prevent any ambitious imagination from inventing scandal. The arrangement was faultless. Lady Keswick could have found nothing to condemn. Society, naturally, would attempt to condemn it anyway.

Sophia’s gaze flicked toward a pair of young ladies beneath a parasol, then toward an elderly gentleman who turned too slowly to pretend he had not been staring. Her fingers tightened very slightly upon Benedict’s sleeve.

He looked down at her. “Are you cold?”

“No.”