Page 204 of Courting the Wrong Duke

Rosalind noticed something else. “Where have you been?”

“The village. We were running low on food, and I wanted ink and a fresh quill.”

William glanced again at her trousers. “You rode there alone?”

Isabella gave him the sort of look that suggested being shot had not made his questions any more intelligent. “I managed to cross Wales without dying, Lord William. I assure you I can survive several miles to a village.”

“I meant no insult.”

“You seem unbearably pleased with herself.” Rosalind said to her friend.

“I had every reason to be.” Isabella began removing her gloves, though the force with which she tugged at each finger suggested her satisfaction was mixed with irritation.

“Do you know how remarkably pleasant it is to travel when everyone believes you are a man? No one questioned why I was alone. No one warned me that I ought to choose a safer road or asked whether someone was expecting me. I purchased food, ink, and a quill without the shopkeeper once suggesting that I consult my father about any of it.”

She looked down at herself, and a trace of bitterness entered her expression.

“Apparently all I required to move freely through the world was a pair of trousers.”

Rosalind’s mouth twitched. William suspected laughing would be physically dangerous, so he resisted.

“Did you encounter the magistrate’s men?” she asked.

The satisfaction faded from Isabella’s expression. “Yes. Reinforcements arrived just before I did.”

William felt himself tense. “Algernon?”

“Gone. Pembry took him.”

For a moment, William could only stare at the pink light spilling across the blankets.

His brother was under arrest.

There was nothing surprising about it. William had heard Algernon confess to murdering their father. He had watched him raise a pistol toward an innocent man and had a bandage wrapped around his own ribs to prove how that had ended. Yet knowing what must happen and discovering that it already had were strangely different things.

Algernon was gone.

Soon they would return to London, and there would be questions William did not know how to answer. Questions about Algernon’s birth and what it meant for the title. About their father’s death. About Edmund’s imprisonment and everything that had happened at Bryn Hir.

His mother would be forced to confront secrets she had spent decades trying to contain, and William did not know what would remain of the family he had believed he possessed when all of them were finally dragged into the light.

A hand slipped into his.

He looked down to find Rosalind’s fingers threaded through his, then raised his gaze to her face.

She did not ask whether he was all right.

William was grateful for that. He would not have known what to tell her.

Isabella seemed to sense the shift in the room. “I should find your father.”

“He was resting when I left him,” Rosalind said.

“Yes. I am certain he has stopped.”

She collected the parcel of food and started toward the door, but paused at the threshold and looked back at William.

“It is good to see you awake, Lord William.”