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“Oh, my Lady… your Grace,” Lizzy leapt back. “My lady. I’m sorry. I hurt you.”
“It’s alright,” Caroline said between gritted teeth.
Lizzy gave a respectable nod, straightened her back, and collected herself. She was already preparing for her new role, Caroline noted with a grin. “I will not fail you.”
“Serve him well,” Caroline replied.
“But aren’t you staying as well?”
“I told you,” Caroline shrugged, “I don’t consider my time as duchess to have been a valid marriage. It will be dissolved.”
“I didn’t mean…” Lizzy blushed and glanced toward the door. “I thought that maybe you and…”
Caroline understood the notion. Perhaps the affection between herself and the duke had not gone unnoticed by the keen-eyed maid.
“I don’t know,” Caroline admitted. “There is too much else to sort out first.”
Lizzy nodded, curtsied once more, and excused herself.
Shortly afterward the duke returned to carry Miss Caroline down the stairs and into the waiting carriage. He was pleased with the news that Lizzy would keep their secret and also that she would accept the position as his trusted housekeeper even though she was young for the job.
“What else did she have to say?” he asked when they had begun to roll the short distance to her father’s house.
“Nothing,” she lied. She was not going to tell him that the maid had wondered if Caroline herself would become a permanent fixture in the household. The truth was that Caroline had begun to wonder the same thing herself.
The Baron Wickham was running a sparse household of only a butler, valet, housekeeper and a handful of maids. He had been used to the townhome being closed for the winter and had only compiled the barest of needs as he had searched for his missing daughter.
Caroline paced circles, limping on her wounded leg in the parlor that she had not set foot in in six long years.
“It’s going to be fine,” Lord Robert crooned as his hand drifted a soothing pattern down her back. The touch had felt so natural that she had allowed herself a deep breath as she leaned into him. “Please sit down. Your wound will be bleeding again.”
She sat and knotted her hands on her lap.
“Your father was worried sick.”
“We ended so poorly,” she worried. “I said that I never wanted to speak to him again.”
“Things are different now. None of that matters.”
“I glowered at him at my wedding,” she groaned.
He breathed a huff of laughter. “I can imagine that.”
Hurried footsteps sounded in the hall and they drew apart.
The doors burst open with such force that they slammed back against the walls to reveal the harried baron wearing a striped banyan and slippers.
He entered the room with two swift steps and then froze. Caroline feared at once that he was furious. She had not seen her father move about with anything but slow, dreary moping for years. She tensed.
Then he was upon her. He enveloped his daughter in his arms and pulled her against his shaking form. He was sobbing and speaking all manner of incoherent apologies. His hands ran over her face as if he did not believe her to be real, needed to feel for himself that she was not some ghost who had been brought here to haunt him.
He turned to the duke with Caroline still tucked against his side and clapped Lord Robert on the shoulder.
“You did it!” the Baron beamed. “You brought her back to me unharmed.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” the duke hemmed.
Caroline was struggling to stand under her father’s embrace. He had flung her around so that her leg was aching to give out beneath her. The pacing had been more than she ought to have done, but she had not been able to sit still.
