Page 212 of Courting the Wrong Duke

“You never taught me. I discovered it naturally.”

That earned her a smile.

Rosalind rose and bent to kiss his forehead, but before she could straighten, William caught her hand.

“Tomorrow?” he asked.

She knew what he meant. Tomorrow they would leave Wales. Tomorrow they would begin the journey back toward London and everything waiting there.

“Tomorrow,” she agreed.

“We go home.”

The word settled strangely inside her.

All her life, home had meant London, her parents, the familiar rooms where she had grown up. Yet after everything that had happened, she was no longer certain it could be contained so neatly within a place.

Perhaps that was another thing she would have to discover.

Rosalind squeezed his fingers. “Rest.”

“Yes, my tyrant.”

She left him smiling.

Downstairs, the house had gone quiet beneath the lazy warmth of the afternoon. Gabriel had disappeared sometime after breakfast, and Isabella had not been seen for nearly an hour, which meant she was almost certainly occupying herself with something interesting.

Rosalind found her father in the drawing room beside one of the tall windows, a blanket draped over his knees and an open book resting forgotten in his lap. Some color had returned to his face over the past four days, though he was still thinner than he ought to be.

The sight of him no longer brought the same breathless disbelief it had at Bryn Hir.

Instead, it brought something quieter.

Rosalind had sent word to her mother almost as soon as they reached Merriton’s estate, telling her that Papa was alive, that they were together, and that they would return as soon as William and her father were well enough to travel. She could only imagine what that letter had meant to her mother after so many weeks of uncertainty.

“Papa?”

Edmund looked around, his face warming immediately. “There you are.”

Rosalind crossed the room and settled into the chair beside him. “William says we may leave tomorrow.”

“So I have heard.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I was hoping to remain here long enough to become intolerable to our host.”

“You have made excellent progress.”

That earned her a smile, though it faded as he closed the book in his lap.

“There is something I have been meaning to say to you.”

Rosalind eyed him suspiciously. “That sounds ominous.”

“It is not.”

“That is precisely what people say before something ominous.”