Page 77 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

Alethea laughed. “And did Joseph tell you?”

“Immediately. With great pleasure. Harper has apparently forgotten that children possess no loyalty when there is an opportunity to expose one another.”

Augusta smiled as the conversation moved away from her gown and toward their households. She had heard versions of these stories before, yet she never tired of them. There was something fascinating about seeing the women she had once known in ballrooms and drawing rooms speaking so casually now of husbands, children, breakfast arguments, misplaced toys, and nursery disasters. Their lives had expanded in ways that did not seem grand from the outside, yet those ordinary details carried a happiness Augusta had once imagined marriage itself would somehow produce automatically.

It had not happened automatically for any of them.

She knew that now.

Charity had fought for Duncan. Temperance had survived enough confusion with Harper to make most women despair of romance entirely. Alethea and Oliver had misunderstood each other often enough that Augusta sometimes wondered how either of them had found the courage to remain patient. Yet here they were, not living in some endless state of perfect romantic bliss but laughing over children and household disasters as though the ordinary difficulties belonged to the happiness rather than interrupting it.

Temperance had moved on to describing an argument with Harper over whether their daughter was old enough to have her own pony when Augusta’s attention began to drift.

She tried to follow.

She truly did.

But all it took was the mention of husbands to bring Ronan back into her thoughts.

His hand at her waist.

The warmth of his palm through her gown and the way his expression had changed when she finally looked at him.

Augusta stared at the green silk in Charity’s hands without seeing it.

He had nearly kissed her.

She was certain of it now.

At the time she had not been certain of anything. Her heart had been beating so violently that coherent thought had become impossible. She remembered only the way his eyes had dropped toward her mouth, the slight tightening of his hand at her waist, and the awful, thrilling second when she had known that if he moved even slightly closer she would not step away.

And then he had wiped the mark from her face and released her.

The disappointment that followed had been almost as humiliating as the anticipation.

She had lain awake far too long afterward, wondering whether she had imagined the entire thing.

Perhaps he had only been looking at her because she was behaving strangely.

Perhaps he had not wanted to kiss her at all.

Perhaps….

“Augusta.”

She blinked.

Her friends were staring at her with concern now.

Augusta straightened. “What?” she asked, even though she still felt a little lightheaded from her reverie.

“I honestly do not know what is going on with you today.” Temperance crossed her arms. “That is the third time that you have done this.”

“The third time what?”

“The third time you have vanished while standing directly in front of us. What is weighing on your mind?”

Him. Somehow, it was always the duke who was weighing on her mind. Though she didn’t prefer to think of him as a weight.