“Ah. Well, that explains the warfare.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Rose babbled softly, her fist still locked around his thumb, and the fire crackled behind its grate. Through the window, the last of the evening light wasbleeding out of the sky, turning the clouds the colour of bruised peaches.
Neither of them mentioned the drawing room conversation. It sat between them like a piece of furniture they’d both agreed to walk around.
Penelope lifted Rose into her arms, and the child settled against her chest with a sigh so contented it bordered on theatrical. Alastair watched Penelope’s hand move in slow circles across the baby’s back—an absent, practised rhythm. For some reason, he was unable to pull his gaze from them.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, before the sensible part of his brain could intervene.
Her gaze flicked to his, wary. “That depends entirely on what you intend to ask.”
“Nothing dangerous. I promise.” He leaned back against the wall, stretching his legs across the rug. “You told me once that you wanted a quiet life. The countryside, no society, no Season. Did you mean it?”
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she might not answer. Rose’s breathing had begun to slow, her small body growing heavier in Penelope’s arms.
“I meant it,” she said at last. “I’ve always felt... out of step with it all. The balls, the gossip, the endless performance of being seen.My sisters thrive on it. Hyacinth lives for it. But I—” She adjusted Rose’s weight, her voice dropping as the baby drifted closer to sleep. “I wanted a garden. A library. Mornings that belonged to me and no one else.”
The simplicity of it caught him off guard. No grand ambition, no schemes for advancement. Just a garden and a library and silence.
“And now?” he asked.
She looked down at Rose. “Now I have a husband I didn’t choose, a baby I didn’t expect, and an estate that belongs to neither of us. Not exactly the quiet life I’d imagined.”
He deserved that, and he took it without flinching. “For what it’s worth, my imagined future didn’t include midnight feedings and pear mush on my waistcoat either.”
Her mouth curved—just barely. “What did it include?”
“Oh, the usual. Cards. Brandy. Gradually scandalising my way through every ballroom in London until they ran out of ballrooms or I ran out of scandal.” He kept his tone light, the way he always did when something pressed too close to bone. “A spectacularly useless existence, when I think on it.”
“You say that as though you’re joking.”
“Half-joking.” He rubbed his jaw, feeling the scrape of stubble against his palm. “The truth is rather less amusing. I never wanted what was expected of me. The title, the duty, the endless parade of obligations designed to make a man feel like a performing bear at a country fair. So I did the opposite. Became everything they said I shouldn’t, just to prove I could.”
Rose’s fingers twitched against Penelope’s collarbone, a tiny reflex of sleep. The nursery had gone dusky and golden, shadows lengthening across the floorboards.
“And did it work?” Penelope asked. “The rebellion?”
“Magnificently. For about a decade.” He met her gaze and the honesty in it cost him more than he’d anticipated. “Then I found myself in a nursery at dusk, covered in pear mush, talking to a woman who sees through every pretence I’ve ever built. So I’d say the rebellion has rather spectacularly failed.”
She didn’t laugh. Didn’t deflect. Simply looked at him with those hazel eyes that stripped every layer of armour he possessed, and he felt the ground beneath him shift.
“You could still leave, you know,” she said quietly. “Go back to London. Resume the cards and the brandy and the scandal. No one would blame you.”
“You would.”
It came out faster than he’d intended—too honest, too bare—and he watched the words land. Her hand stilled on Rose’s back.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” she said, though her voice had dropped to a whisper. “But I would—” She pressed her lips together, catching whatever confession had been forming.
“You would what?”
“Notice,” she finished. “I would notice your absence.”
The fire popped. A log shifted and sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. Alastair held very still, afraid that if he moved, the strange honesty of this moment would scatter like startled birds.
“This is strange, isn’t it?” she said after a long pause. “All of it. This house. This arrangement. The fact that I know how you take your tea and how to make you stop talking, and yet we are?—”
“Strangers?”