Page 74 of A Duchess for his Family

It was the order and routine of the quiet machinery that kept a household secure. He'd believed Sophia would enter that life and complete it. Her gentleness would give the girls what he could not, while his steadiness would provide what she lacked. Instead, she questioned every decision, softened every refusal, and treated rules as objects to be examined, altered, or discarded whenever affection pulled her elsewhere.

Perhaps I have been rash.

The thought was unwelcome but would not be dismissed. Perhaps, in his eagerness to provide the girls with warmth, he had chosen a woman too inclined to indulgence. Perhaps kindness without firmness did not create a home but disorder disguised as happiness.

Sophia did not feel like his ally with the girls. She felt like their accomplice. And as Benedict returned to his study, the word that followed him was not warmth, nor home, nor family.

It was chaos.

Chapter Eighteen

“Do you suppose frogs object to being named?”

Sophia looked up from the strawberry she was cutting into quarters. “I imagine it depends entirely upon the name.”

Marjorie crouched at the edge of the pond, with her skirts gathered carelessly around her knees and one hand braced against a smooth gray stone. “Sir Reginald.”

“A frog of discernment would object very strongly,” Amelia said.

She sat several feet behind her sister on the picnic blanket, weaving a chain of small white flowers with the grave attention of a jeweler handling diamonds. Her bonnet remained properly tied beneath her chin. Marjorie’s bonnet, by contrast, hung down her back and seemed to have abandoned all hope of fulfilling its duty.

“Sophia?” Marjorie demanded. “You must decide.”

Sophia pretended to consider. “Sir Reginald is a respectable name. But perhaps too respectable for a creature presently sitting in mud.”

Marjorie glanced at the frog. “He may have suffered a reversal of fortune.”

“Then we must treat him with particular kindness,” Amelia replied softly.

The frog, perhaps unwilling to have his history invented by three ladies of Rivermere, leaped from the stone and vanished beneath the water with a small, silvery splash.

Marjorie sighed. “He has escaped before I could restore him to society.”

Sophia laughed and placed the sliced strawberry upon Amelia’s plate.

The afternoon had unfolded with the gentle perfection of something Sophia knew she would remember later. Sunlight lay warm across the meadow. A breeze moved through the long grass, stirring the branches of the willow that bent over the pond, its trailing leaves brushing the surface like idle fingers. The air smelled of warm earth, crushed mint, and the seed cake Cook had packed beneath a folded linen cloth.

The pond itself was small, no broader than the morning room at Rivermere, and so clear near the bank that Sophia could see pale stones beneath the water. Dragonflies hovered above the reeds. Somewhere in the meadow, a lark poured song into the bright blue emptiness of the sky.

A month had passed since the wedding.

Only a month, though Sophia sometimes felt she had lived at Rivermere for years and, at other moments, as if she had arrived that very morning with her trunks, her new title, and the fearful conviction that the house might discover she did not belong in it.

Yet the strange grandeur of her position began to soften around the edges. She no longer turned whenever someone addressed her as Your Grace. She knew which stair creaked outside the library and which footman secretly carried sugared almonds for Marjorie. Amelia left two novels in Sophia’s sitting room and began referring to the armchair nearest the window as hers. Marjorie entered Sophia’s bedchamber each morning with the confidence of a creditor collecting a debt.

Even Benedict became familiar to her in ways she had not expected. She knew the sound of his footsteps in the corridor. She knew he loosened his cuffs when reading difficult correspondence and touched two fingers to the bridge of his nose when Marjorie’s explanations grew especially inventive. She knew his mouth could soften when he believed no one was watching him, and that when they sat together after dinner, the silence between them no longer felt like a failure of conversation.

There were still distances. There were still words neither of them had the courage to speak. But there were also mornings when his hand lingered at her waist as he passed behind her chair, and evenings when she looked up from her book to find his eyes already on her. Those moments left warmth beneath her skin long after he turned away.

Sophia had begun, cautiously and with a happiness she hardly dared examine, to think of Rivermere as home.

“May I take off my shoes?” Marjorie asked.

“No.”

“I have not yet told you why.”

“You wish to walk in the water.”