She Forgot the Duke Who Broke Her Heart… Then Fell in Love With Him Again

Chapter 7

Cecily went out for air.

The village morning was quiet and ordinary, and she made herself walk slowly into it. Children ran along the dirt road with hoops and shouted at each other in the flat vowels of the valley. Thomasina Lorry carried loaves from the bakehouse in a basket under a cloth. A dog slept on the steps of the smithy with its chin on its paws.

Simple. Honest. Nothing like the life she was supposed to have lived.

And then, in the middle of the square, it happened.

A young couple came down past the church wall, walking close, arms linked. As they passed her the man said something low into the woman’s ear, and the woman laughed and struck his shoulder with the back of her hand, and their fingers touched and caught and held without either of them looking down.

Cecily stopped walking.

Something moved through her chest — not memory, not a picture. A longing so deep and so sudden that she had to put her hand on a wall.

I feel as though I am missing something, she thought. Something that was mine.

Across the square, two men took off their hats.

She followed their eyes.

At the far end of the road, where the lane opened toward the moor, the Duke of Wrenmoor was standing on the bank above the mill ditch.

He had not approached. He had not called out. He had not sent Hollis with a note or a gift or a demand. He simply stood there with his hands behind his back, in the cold, on the far side of the entire village, giving her exactly the distance he had promised and looking at her as though every step she took mattered.

Cecily felt her breath catch.

This was the man London society whispered about — the cold Duke, the one who could end a conversation with a glance. He did not look cold now. He looked like a man waiting for a verdict.

Why would a man like that wait so patiently for a wife he had once ignored?

The question turned over in her, slow and troubling, and she did not have an answer for it.

She took one step toward him.

And Adrian Ashford — who had stood in the freezing wind for nearly two hours for the sole purpose of being seen by her and nothing else — inclined his head, once, the way a man does when he has heard the jury come back, and turned and walked away down the moor road.

Cecily stood in the square with the cold coming up through her shoes and understood that she had just been given something she did not know how to name.

Distance. Honesty. And a question she could not stop asking herself.

Why are you doing this?

Behind her, unnoticed, Hannah Beckett had come out of the cottage and was standing at the top of the lane with her hand pressed flat against the little framed drawing above her — no, against the gatepost, though she would swear later she had not left the house at all that morning.

And up on the bank, where the Duke had stood, there was a small brown-paper parcel tied with string, set down on the wall, waiting.

Cecily did not see it.

Neither, that morning, did she see the ring of pale skin on Hannah’s third finger, where a gold band had been worn for a long time and taken off.