Page 45 of Courting the Wrong Duke

The room seemed to fall away around her.

“Rosalind?”

Isabella's voice sounded strangely distant.

She could not answer.

She knew every stroke of Father's handwriting. She had watched those same elegant letters appear on birthday cards, little notes left beside her breakfast tray, and books he insisted she read before returning them to his shelves.

She had spent weeks searching for some sign that he had intended to leave them.

Now she held one in trembling hands.

“What is it?” Isabella asked again, abandoning the cabinet and hurrying to her side.

Rosalind swallowed hard.

“It...” Her voice failed her. She tried again. “It's Father's.”

Neither woman spoke after that.

Rosalind slipped a finger beneath the seal.

She hesitated.

Once it was broken, there would be no returning to this moment. Whatever Father had intended to tell them had remained hidden until now.

She drew a careful breath and broke the wax.

The paper crackled softly as she unfolded it.

Isabella leaned closer, and together they stared at the familiar script.

Rosalind steadied herself before beginning to read aloud.

“And thus the heart will break…

yet brokenly live on.”

Chapter 7

William had intended to leave shortly after breakfast.

His appointment with Mr. Pritchard, the bootmaker on Bond Street, had been arranged nearly a fortnight earlier, and his valet had already laid out the dark blue coat William reserved for town calls.

Instead, he found himself standing in the breakfast room, absently stirring tea that had long since grown cold.

His thoughts refused to remain on boots.

Instead, they wandered back to the exhibition, and to Rosalind.

More specifically, to the look that had crossed her face when he told her about the horse.

Hope.

It had appeared so suddenly she had not thought to conceal it. For one fleeting, unguarded instant, she had looked exactly as he remembered her from years ago, before Edmund Carlisle's disappearance had hollowed every smile with uncertainty.

The moment had vanished almost as quickly as it came. Caution had returned, and with it her determination to verify every word he had told her. He would have thought less of her had she done otherwise.