Page 92 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The boys were hers.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

She moved before the thought finished forming.

There were ten feet between her and the boys, Tidswell’s body filling the center of it, his blade catching the firelight. She closed the distance in three strides her knees should not have managed, stepping between the man and the twins with her arms spread wide and her back to the boys.

Her body—her treacherous, insufficient body—became the only wall that mattered.

Tidswell’s eyes found her, lost somewhere in the past. The words spilling past his lips tangled around a name that was not hers and a love that had never been returned and a grief so old it had calcified into something structural, load-bearing, the thing around which he had built every remaining year.

“Step away.” His voice broke on the second word. “They are hers.”

“They are mine.” She said it without hesitation. She reached behind her and felt Freddie’s fingers close around her wrist hard enough to bruise, and Charlie’s smaller hand press flat against her spine. She held them both through touch and the immovable certainty of a body that had decided where it was standing.

“Move aside, or I shall⁠—”

“Then you shall have to cut through me first.” She held his gaze. The smoke thickened between them, the heat pressing upward through the floorboards. “And I will still be holding on when you do.”

Something shifted across his face. Not at her words, not at the blade’s uselessness, but at something beyond her, where the firelight from the square threw its shifting orange glow against the wall. His mouth opened. The knife dropped to his side as though his arm had forgotten its purpose, his head tilted, and his face softened.

“Theresa,” he whispered.

The blade clattered to the floor. He took a step toward the wall, toward the light, toward whatever he saw there that no one else could see, and his hand reached out, open, helpless, trembling.

Alice did not wait to understand it. She seized both boys and ran.

The corridor had become unrecognizable, smoke rising at chest height, dense and grey-brown, carrying the acrid sweetness of burning plaster. She crouched low with one arm around Freddie and the other around Charlie, and followed the wall beneath her hand until she reached the landing.

The stairs below were engulfed in flame. The lower flight pulsed across the banister and the treads and the carpet runner, and the heat hit her face like an open hand.

She pulled the boys back. Pressed them low against the corridor wall where the air was still breathable. Crouched over them, her arms wrapped around their shoulders, the cotton of her nightgown already warm against her skin.

Freddie’s hand gripped her arm. Charlie’s face pressed into her shoulder. And she held on.

The carriage had not fully stopped when Kenneth hit the cobblestones.

Three streets back, the glow above the roofline had thrown the chimneys and dormer windows into black relief against an orange sky, and the smell had arrived, dense and chemical. Beneath it was a sound his chest recognized before his mind did: the low groan of something collapsing.

Staff clustered on the far side of the square in livery and nightclothes. The fire engine stood at the corner, its crew pumping in grim rhythm, the water arcing toward the upper floors and falling short.

The housekeeper found him before he found her, soot-streaked, her cap gone, her composure gone with it.

“Your Grace. The upper floors, the nursery, the—We could not…” Her voice fractured. “Miss Leyton tried. The corridor was already⁠—”

“Where are they?”

“Still inside, Your Grace.”

Kenneth was running before she finished speaking.

He heard Jonathan behind him, boots on the cobblestones and his name called once, sharp and bitten off, and he heard the housekeeper cry out. Then he heard nothing, because the space where hearing lived had filled with something that occupied his whole body.

The front door hung open. Smoke choked the entrance hall, lit from the upper stairs in shifting orange, and the heat struck his chest at the threshold.

The first flight of stairs held. The second was worse—smoke banked along the ceiling so thickly that the only light came from the fire itself. Kenneth climbed through it with his coat pulled across his mouth, lungs burning, eyes streaming, every breath fought for.

At the upper landing, the corridor stretched before him in smoke and shifting orange, alive with the crack of timber, the hiss of plaster, and the heavy groan of a beam giving way somewhere below.