Page 74 of How Not to Marry a Duke

Fourteen gold threads catching the dying candlelight. Seven freckles across her nose. Twenty-nine letters he had written and one that had found its way to her. Nine years of wanting. Eighteen months of silence. Three days of freedom.

One woman. One choice. One future stretching before them like a promise.

"What are you counting?" she murmured against his shoulder.

"Everything." He pressed his lips to her hair. "I am counting everything."

She laughed—that bright, startled sound that had undone him in a stable nine years ago, that had haunted him through a war and an engagement and eighteen months of careful, desperate restraint.

"Well," she said, tilting her face up to his, "you had better start counting the days until our wedding. Because I intend to make you wait at least a fortnight before I let you make an honest woman of me."

"A fortnight?" He feigned horror. "That is fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours. Twenty thousand, one hundred and sixty minutes⁠—"

She kissed him to stop him counting.

It was, Frederick decided, the best way to be interrupted.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Sisters

The morning of her wedding, Florinda could not find her shoes.

Not her everyday shoes—those were precisely where she had left them, beside her dressing table. But the white silk slippers that had been dyed to match her gown, the ones Martha had polished until they gleamed like moonlight, had vanished entirely from the wardrobe where she had placed them the night before.

"They were here," she said, staring at the empty shelf. Her morning dress—a simple muslin affair she had donned hours ago, before the chaos of preparations began—felt inadequate for the crisis at hand. "I placed them here myself. Last night. I remember placing them."

Martha, who had been Florinda's maid since she was sixteen and had developed an immunity to theatrical distress, continued laying out the wedding gown with unruffled calm. "Perhaps one of the children moved them, my lady. Princess Charlotte was exploring the house yesterday evening with considerable enthusiasm."

"Charlotte would not steal shoes."

"Princess Charlotte once stole the Archbishop's hat during Easter services," Martha observed. "Shoes would present no moral obstacle."

This was, Florinda had to admit, an excellent point.

"I shall send word to the nursery," Martha continued, smoothing the white muslin with practiced hands. "In the meantime, my lady ought to begin dressing. The ceremony is in three hours, and your hair alone shall require two of them."

Florinda's hand drifted unconsciously to her hair, which fell past her waist in a cascade of gold waves. It was her one vanity—her crown, Margot called it, the glory that transformed her from merely pretty to genuinely remarkable. Today it would be dressed with wildflowers from the garden, woven through the strands until she looked like a creature from a fairy tale.

Or a madwoman, she thought. Depending on one's perspective.

"I cannot marry a duke without shoes," she said, though even as she spoke, she wondered if this was strictly true.

Martha's face suggested she was wondering the same thing.

Drusilla found her twenty minutes later, seated at her dressing table whilst Martha worked sections of hair into elaborate arrangements.

"You look terrified," her sister announced from the doorway.

"I am not terrified."

"You are clutching the edge of the table hard enough to leave marks." Drusilla crossed the room with the analytical precision she brought to everything, her eyes cataloguing details in that way that had always made Florinda feel examined. "Also, your shoes have been located. Hope had them. She was attempting to teach Marmalade to walk in them."

"Marmalade is a cat."

"I am aware. Hope maintains that Marmalade is a criminal mastermind who requires proper footwear for her schemes." Drusilla settled onto the edge of the bed, her moss-green morning dress pooling around her. "The shoes are unharmed, though they do smell faintly of fish. Apparently criminal masterminds require bribes."

Martha made a small sound that might have been a laugh, quickly suppressed.