Page 42 of How Not to Marry a Duke

I counted the gold threads in your hair.

Her hand rose to her hair. This time, she did not stop it.

He loved her. He had buried the memory of that stable kiss, told himself it meant nothing, and then she had appeared in Edward's garden—barefoot, laughing, impossibly alive—and everything he had buried came rushing back. He was going to marry another woman because honour demanded it, and he would spend the rest of his life counting things he could not have, and she would spend the rest of hers knowing that she had been wanted—truly wanted—and had done nothing to claim it.

The letter blurred. Florinda realised she was crying.

She had not cried when Edwin left her. She had not cried when her horse threw her. She had not cried when Margot arrived to take her away from Carthedge, or when Frederick had stood in the entrance hall and spoken to her in careful, distant platitudes whilst his eyes said everything his mouth could not.

She cried now.

Great, heaving sobs that shook her shoulders and made her splinted leg ache. She pressed the letter to her face and breathed in the faint trace of sandalwood that clung to the pages, and she wept for every year they had wasted, every word they had not spoken, every choice that had brought them to this impossible place.

He loved her.

He was going to marry Penelope.

And Florinda did not know how she was supposed to survive it.

Chapter Thirteen

The Garden Visit

Frederick could not find the letter.

He had searched his study three times—the desk drawers, the correspondence tray, the locked compartment where he kept documents too sensitive for casual viewing. Nothing. The letter was gone.

He tried to remember. He had been writing late, the candles burning low, the words spilling onto the page faster than he could govern them. When he had finished, he had folded the pages and⁠—

The top drawer.

He had put it in the top drawer. Not the bottom, where he kept the other letters—the forty-two confessions he had written and never sent, locked away where no one would find them. The top drawer, where outgoing correspondence waited for Pemberton to collect.

No. Surely not. He would not have been so careless. He would not have⁠—

"Pemberton." His voice emerged sharper than he intended. "A word."

His secretary appeared in the doorway, ledger in hand. "Your Grace?"

"The correspondence you sent out yesterday. What was included?"

"The usual items, Your Grace. The horse report for Miss Ashbourne, the Dowager's note to Lady Ashworth, Lady Penelope's letter regarding the wedding breakfast—" Pemberton paused, consulting his mental inventory. "And a personal letter. Addressed to Miss Ashbourne in your hand. I assumed it was meant to accompany the other correspondence, so I included it in the packet."

The floor tilted beneath Frederick's feet.

"Your Grace? Is there a difficulty?"

"No." The word came out strangled. "No difficulty. That will be all."

Pemberton withdrew. Frederick stood motionless in the centre of his study, his mind cataloguing the disaster with brutal precision.

The top drawer. He had put the letter in the top drawer like a fool, like a man half-asleep, like a man who had wanted so desperately to send it that his hands had betrayed him.

She had read it. She had read every word—the confession, the wanting, the admission that he could not stop counting things that belonged to her. She knew. She knew everything.

He should write to her. He should apologise, explain that the letter was never meant to be sent, beg her forgiveness for burdening her with declarations she could not answer.

Instead, he called for his horse.