Page 11 of The Duke and His Jilted Bride

“You must not care what they think,” he said quietly, the way he said most things. “You must not care what I think, either.”

“Easy for you to say.”

"Yes, possibly. But I shall not force you into this marriage. I can find another bride. You owe nothing to me.”

She did not mean to feel this way, but his candid remark made her jealous. Was it possible, she wondered, that she wanted to be wanted by him? That she wanted him to see her as more than a solution or his brother’s poor cast-off?

Such a silly thing to worry about, she thought privately, while her entire life had just been turned on its head – male esteem.

“You don't understand what their opinion means,” she argued weakly, hiding her face in the shade of her bonnet. “It follows a woman – even a duchess, if that is what I am to become. In three months their accumulated opinions will have settled into something permanent, and permanent is what matters… I will permanently be the woman who was abandoned at the altar and saved by you. They will never see me as anything different. We can’t lie about the truth.”

He considered this a moment and said, “Then you must not care anymore about your permanence in their eyes either, because you will be my wife. And that changes things considerably.”

“Do you mean to say that I should only concern myself with what you think as my husband, from now on?” she challenged, having never permitted herself to speak this way with Frederick. Their mutual dependence had changed the rules of engagement.

He laughed, and tried to hide it. It pleased her to know he was not always serious and blunt. “I’m curious… Did you and Frederick have conversations like this too? You are unsuspectingly bold in your manner of speech.”

“Well… Did you and the Lady Seraphina?” she deflected.

He shook his head.

She found, abruptly, that she had lost the thread of the conversation as she observed him.

Then, from nowhere, a small boy came hurtling between them at considerable speed, chasing a red leather ball that had escaped him across the wide dirt path. It bounced directly toward Aurelia, who caught it without thinking with one hand, cleanly. She looked at it a moment, shook out her injured wrist, and crouched to offer it back.

The boy stopped. He was perhaps four years old, round-faced and suspicious of her. His tweed cap was slightly askew, fine blond hair peeking out from underneath. She felt lighter as she looked at him, and her mind flashed involuntarily with thoughts of her own potential children.

With him, she realised. With Evander. Their children, not just hers, if they were to have any at all. Her throat became dry. They had decided on a wedding and spoken about some of the specifics. But that part, the regular intimacy of a marriage, had not been discussed at all.

“Here,” she said, shaking her head to rid herself of the painful thoughts, holding out the ball to the child with a forced smile. “Take it.”

His round, blue eyes fell on the ball. Then he smiled back and took it, before darting off in the direction of a well-dressed woman with equally blond hair, walking beside the gentleman who must have been her husband. She was heavy with another child. Aurelia winced involuntarily.

“The child,” Evander said, after a moment, looking at the family too, “seemed to like you.”

“Children generally do,” Aurelia confessed. She watched the boy disappear around a bend in the path, still clutching his ball. “I love them.” She said it simply. Then she glanced at him. “Do you?”

“I have not been around enough to make up my mind.”

“But you must have debated…” Her breath came in hard, panic rising. “When you were contemplating your marriage…”

He shrugged. “I contemplated them insofar as they were a thing to be produced, little more than that.”

She blinked. He said it with such confidence that it took a moment to register as the thing it was. Then she pressed her lips together firmly and said, “A particularly ducal observation,” sounded more crestfallen than she intended.

They walked on. Behind them, she could hear her aunt murmuring something to her maid about the dog, then about her and Evander. She sounded pleased by the walk so far. But it had left Aurelia with more questions than answers.

“Do you think,” Aurelia said carefully as they approached the bank of the river, “that this will satisfy people? Your family, in particular? A quiet wedding and a retreat to Norfolk with me? What about… what about you? What do you want?”

“Me?” He paused, looked out over the expanse of water. “I…”

Before he could answer, voices sounded nearby.

Behind them on the path, a woman she vaguely recognised from her aunt's circle was approaching with her husband. The husband leaned toward his wife and said something as they drew closer. The wife smiled politely, and then the smile did something complicated as her eyes moved between Aurelia and Evander. They approached with Violet in tow – and the dog of course, behind them on its leash.

“We heard the news but we assumed it was all a fabrication.” The woman said as she appeared, introducing herself, smiling dubiously. “Good afternoon, Your Grace. And congratulations to you both, I assume?”

Aurelia took no note of her name or her tone. She hung harder onto Evander’s arm, coming close to him, feeling suddenly protective of this man who only yesterday she had mostly feared.