In three days?—
A soft knock interrupted her spiraling thoughts. “Miss?” Annie’s voice filtered through the door.
“Are you all right?”
No. She was very far from all right.
“I’m fine,” she called back, the lie automatic. “I just need a moment.”
But moments wouldn’t help. Hours wouldn’t help. Nothing would help except perhaps divine intervention, neither of which seemed particularly forthcoming.
Penelope crossed to her window, staring out at the London street below. Life continued as normal out there—carriages passing, pedestrians walking, the world spinning on as though nothing had changed.
But everything had changed. Everything.
Penelope pressed her forehead against the cool glass, trying to steady her breathing, trying to find some measure of calm in the chaos consuming her thoughts.
Below her window, a familiar figure emerged from her family’s townhouse—tall, dark-haired, moving with the casual confidence of a man who had just sealed a bargain.
The Duke of Blackmere. Her future husband.
Penelope watched him climb into his carriage and disappear into the London traffic, taking with him any possibility of the quiet, simple life she had once imagined for herself.
And in its place? An uncertain future bound to a man who had promised her everything except the one thing she suddenly, desperately realized she wanted.
The truth was, she didn’t even know what that was yet.
But she had three days to figure it out.
CHAPTER 6
“Do you, Penelope Hartwell, take this man?—”
The vicar’s words sounded far away. Penelope heard them as though from underwater, distorted beneath the hammering of her own heartbeat. The chapel walls seemed to press closer with each breath. Morning light came through the stained glass in patches—red, gold, blue—colours that belonged at a celebration, not this.
Her wedding day.
She stood in her mother’s best gown, hastily altered to fit her smaller frame. The ivory silk felt heavy. Wrong. No time for a proper wedding dress. No time for flowers or music or any of the things she’d once imagined, back when she’d been foolish enough to imagine such things at all.
No time for anything except this rushed ceremony in a chapel that smelled of damp stone and old candle wax, witnessed by a handful of people who wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Her father stood rigid beside her, jaw locked. Her mother dabbed at dry eyes with a handkerchief. Hyacinth sat in the second pew, fingers twisting together in her lap.
And Alastair?—
Penelope made herself look at him.
The Duke of Blackmere stood beside her in formal black, his cravat tied with precision. He looked every inch the aristocrat—tall, imposing, devastatingly handsome. But the easy charm that usually clung to him had vanished entirely. She’d seen him smile at her across ballrooms, seen him lean against doorframes with that insufferable confidence. Not today.
He stared straight ahead at the vicar. His lips pursed, a muscle twitching in his jaw. The hand at his side had curled into a fist.
He looked—well. Not how a groom was supposed to look. Then again, this was not how weddings were supposed to be.
“—to have and to hold, from this day forward?—”
Penelope should answer. The vicar was waiting, his rheumy eyes on her.
But her throat had closed.