Page 12 of The Feared Duke’s Found Family

Lysander stared at his daughter, a heavy, silent weight settling on his shoulders. She was seven years old. She should have been hiding beneath her own blankets, waiting for a mother to come in and smooth her hair, brush away her fears, and whisper that the night was safe. Instead, she slipped down the cold stone hallway in the middle of the night to soothe her twin brother, playing the caretaker because no one else could.

He looked past her down the dark corridor toward the south wing, where Peter’s chamber sat adjacent to Michael’s.

The floor layout was entirely impractical. Michael’s sleepwalking was becoming more frequent, his terror louder and more violent with each passing week. Having all three children clustered in the same wing meant that every nightmare tore through the entire floor, waking Peter, shaking Emily, and leaving the nursery maids frayed and exhausted by dawn.

Their rooms must be moved.

Peter and Emily had to be moved to the west wing, far enough away that Michael’s terror would not reach their walls. They could not keep losing sleep like this.

Lysander brought his attention back to the small girl standing before him. He reached out a hand, intending to rest a light, reassuring palm on her shoulder, but he caught himself. He saw the subtle tension in her jaw, the way her gaze flicked down to his large fingers.

He slowly withdrew his hand, resting it back on his knee.

“It is late, Emily,” Lysander said softly. “You should be in your bed. Do you require my help returning to your room?”

Emily looked at him. It was a strange, unreadable look—devoid of childish warmth, empty of the natural affection a daughter ought to hold for her father. Her pale face remained entirely expressionless, a blank slate that mirrored the very coldness he had cultivated in his house for four long years.

“I do not need help,” she said flatly. Her voice had no anger in it, no defiance, no tears. It was simply a statement of fact.

She turned on her bare heels without another word. Her small figure moved smoothly away from him, her nightdress brushing against the floorboards as she walked back into the dark corridor, completely unbothered by the shadows, completely self-reliant.

Lysander remained on one knee outside the nursery door, watching her small back retreat until she disappeared into her bedchamber and the latch clicked shut.

The silence returned to the hallway, thick, suffocating, and absolute.

Lysander slowly rose to his feet, his broad shoulders framed by the wall. His children were raising themselves in the dark, hardening their hearts before they had even grown into their own skin. They did not trust him to soothe them; they did not look to him for comfort, and they certainly did not feel safe in his presence.

He checked his pocket watch once more.

The gold face glimmered under the wall sconce. The clock was ticking. At noon, he would stand on the doorstep of Lady Fanny Waldron’s home. He would bring her to this house, place his children in her care, and restore a mother to these quiet, broken hallways—no matter what it cost him.

Six

The delicate porcelain cup clicked against its saucer, the sound far too sharp for the heavy silence in the breakfast parlor.

Fanny stared at the unspread plum jam, her toast cold and forgotten on her plate. Dark circles beneath her eyes burned from a night spent staring at the ceiling, watching the window frame’s shadow shift across the plaster. Every time she closed her eyes, the echo of tearing silk rang in her ears, followed by the terrifying, unyielding weight of Lysander’s gray gaze in the moonlight.

Before she could lift her tea to her lips, the heavy oak doors of the morning room swung back so hard they slammed against the wainscoting.

“Fanny!”

Her mother, Lady Gooldwer, stormed into the room in lilac silk and morning lace. Right at her heels, a flurry of wrinkled snouts and frantic scratching claws heralded her three pugs—Barnaby, Pip, and the ancient, wheezing Duchess. The dogs scrambled across the rug, yapping at the table legs in a chorus of high-pitched, hysterical yips.

Lady Gooldwer halted by the sideboard, her hand pressed dramatically over her bosom, her cap trembling with every shallow breath.

“Is it true?” her mother screeched, her voice pitching so high it made Pip bark louder. “Tell me the gossip rags have lied! Tell me the entire city of London has lost its collective mind!”

Fanny set her cup down slowly, keeping her shoulders straight, her spine locked into the rigid posture she had maintained since setting foot back in this house. “Good morning, Mama. Lord Bromley stepped on the hem of my gown deliberately.”

“I do not care about Lord Bromley!” Lady Gooldwer cut across her, waving a lace handkerchief frantically in the air as if trying to ward off a swarm of bees. “I do not care about his boots, or his clumsiness, or his wretched, sniveling family! The fact remains that your dress was torn off your back in the middle of Greystone Manor! In front of fifty matrons!”

“My dress was not torn off my back, Mama,” Fanny said softly, her voice steady despite the familiar prickle of heat crawling up her neck. “The hooks gave way.”

“You are ruined!” Her mother threw her hands to the heavens, causing the pugs to circle her ankles in a frenzy. “Utterly, irrevocably ruined! I had given up hope years ago that you would ever secure a match, Fanny. I had reconciled myself to it! I told myself, ‘Very well, Fanny shall be my quiet, dignified spinster daughter who tends to my vapor baths and organizes the linen.’ But you could not even give me that! You could not even be a dignified spinster! You had to become a scandalous one!”

Fanny looked at her mother, her amber eyes clear and calm. She felt no sudden burst of anger, only the dull, familiar ache of long-established reality.

“Mama,” Fanny said quietly, “thanks to Father’s disgrace, our name was already ruined. Even after he returned four years ago, claiming he wanted to reconcile, it took him less than a month to fall straight back into his old vices of gambling and women. We have been surviving on the outer fringes of society for forty-eight months.”