Page 82 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The butler’s knock ended the conversation. “Lord Peltbury, Your Grace.”

The drawing room had been arranged. Kenneth stood at the window. Alice sat in the chair nearest the hearth, her hands folded in her lap, her spine straight. Rachel and George occupied the settee opposite, their fingers intertwined. George wore the expression of a man who understood that his presence in the room was both necessary and secondary to the conversation about to unfold.

Lord Peltbury entered with the brisk gait of a man who had dressed in haste and was pretending otherwise. His waistcoat was buttoned one hole off its proper alignment.

“Bearmoor.” He nodded to Kenneth. His gaze swept across the room, passed over Alice, found Rachel, and stopped.

The silence that followed was not the silence of breakfast, which had been tentative and warm. This was the silence of a man encountering a thing he had searched for and finding it arrived in a form he had not wanted.

“Rachel.” His voice was flat. His eyes moved from her face to her midsection and stayed. “I see.”

“Father.” Rachel’s voice held, though the effort was visible in her jaw.

“I see,” he said again. He looked at George. “And this is the man.”

“George Mercer, My Lord.” George rose. His bow was the same he had given Kenneth: sincere, unpolished, straight-backed. “I am responsible, and I intend to⁠—”

“Sit down.” Peltbury did not raise his voice. The dismissal was carried in the tone of a man who had weighed the person before him and found them unworthy of standing. “I did not come here to hear from the music teacher.”

Kenneth watched from the window. He had made a decision before Peltbury arrived, a decision that required a discipline he rarely had cause to exercise: he would not speak first. Alice had asked to tell her father the truth. She would tell him. Kenneth would stand at the window and hold his tongue for precisely as long as his judgement held.

“Father.” Alice’s voice was clear and level. “Rachel and George are getting married. Kenneth has secured a special licence and a position for George in Dorset. They will live quietly, away from London.”

Peltbury turned to her. The expression on his face was the one Kenneth had witnessed in this same room weeks ago, the practised assessment, though the veneer of pleasantness had been stripped from it and what remained was the raw mechanism beneath.

“Married,” he said. “To the piano teacher’s boy.”

“To the man she loves.”

“To the man she has ruined herself for.” His voice rose, his composure slipping. “The man for whom she threw away a dukedom, disgraced this family, humiliated a peer of the realm before God and three hundred witnesses, and now stands before me carrying the evidence of her shame as though it were something to present in a drawing room rather than⁠—”

“Stop,” Alice cut him off.

She rose from her chair, the motion unhurried. Kenneth saw the change begin in her shoulders, in the line of her spine.

“Rachel did not ruin herself. She made a choice. It was not the choice you would have made for her, and it was not the choice that served your ambitions. I understand that the distinction is difficult for you, Father, because you have never once shown an interest in the difference between what your daughters want and what you require of them.”

Her voice was measured. Kenneth noted the control in it, the same control he employed himself, and he watched her hold it with the awareness of a man observing something he had underestimated.

Peltbury’s chin rose. “You forget yourself, Alice.”

“I don’t.” She drew in a breath. Her hands clenched at her sides, and when her voice came again, it was no longer measured. “You have spent our whole lives telling us what we are. Rachel is the accomplished one. Alice is the difficult one. Rachel is thin and graceful and suitable. Alice is too plump and too plain and too much of everything you never wanted in a daughter.” Her voice thickened, but she did not stop. “You looked at us and saw a ledger. One asset. One liability. You managed us accordingly, and you never once asked whether the accounting was true, because it never occurred to you that the figures might be wrong.”

The room held its breath.

“She is carrying your grandchild.”

The composure returned on the word, not the same composure she had started with, not the careful steadiness she had inherited from years of sitting in rooms where she was unwelcome, but something rebuilt on the far side of the breaking. Sturdier. Earned.

“She is frightened and ashamed, and she has spent months hiding from you because she believed your disappointment was worse than being alone. The fact that she was right about that is not her failure.” Alice’s chin did not lower. “It is yours, Father.”

Peltbury stared at her. His face had turned the color of old linen, and his mouth worked once without producing sound. Then it found its footing.

“You have no right.” His voice had the hard, brittle quality of something close to shattering. He turned from Alice to Kenneth. “Is this what you permit in your household, Bearmoor? Your wife speaking to her father in this manner? Perhaps if you had managed her as carefully as you manage your tenants⁠—”

Kenneth had not moved. He had stood at the window throughout all of it, his hands clasped behind his back, his jaw set, watching Alice say the things she had been carrying for twenty-one years.

The discipline of silence had been considerable. Every instinct he possessed had urged intervention, the same reflex that had brought him to this drawing room’s doorway weeks ago, the impulse of a man who understood a threat and moved toward it without deliberation.