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“I heard enough,” he replied. “You were not meant to, but you did. And you have been carrying their speculation as if it were a diagnosis ever since. I am telling you it is not.”

“I have my courses,” she said defensively. “Mostly on time. I don’t faint, but I have fallen when I stumble. I only limp. I am only…” Her voice wobbled. “I feel…half.” She’d ever felt like half before, she’d hoped to be Pepper and Lady Barbara all at once. But now, her broken heart had broken more than she’d imagined.

“You are not half,” he said, with unexpected fierceness. “You walk. You think. Your nerves misbehave in one ankle. That is all we know.”

She stared at him. Relief and despair knotted together in her chest until she could hardly breathe around them.

“Then why,” she whispered, “does it feel as though the whole world sees me as…faulty goods?”

He gave a sigh as if he knew the trouble she’d seen. “Because the whole world is lazy,” he said. “It prefers obvious faults. They are easier to talk about than invisible strengths.”

A laugh escaped her then, unexpected and shaky. It died quickly.

He watched her for a quiet moment. Then, very gently: “Why do you suddenly ask me this now, Lady Barbara Why today?”

Of course she would ask him now. Not when she was sixteen and thought marriage a distant, theoretical thing. Not when Wyndale was only a signature on a circular she wanted to burn. Only now, when she had finally been foolish enough to fall in love with the man behind the ink and then discover he had been wearing that name all along. Only now, when she had told him not to touch her in front of half the ton and meant every syllable, and still could not quite make her heart stop reaching for the memory of his hands.

She did not know whether she would ever forgive him. She did not know whether she would ever speak to him again. But love, it seemed, was as careless of sense as the mumps had been of her nerves. It went on beating away in her chest regardless, and it knew one thing with painful clarity: his life had been built around responsibility. Tenants. Flour. Boards. A title that fed more mouths than his own. If she ever stood beside him, she would be asking him to set all of that against her.

She stared down at her knuckles. The skin there was pale where she’d scrubbed flour from it a thousand times. “Because,” she said slowly, “I do not want to marry a man I love if I cannot give him what he needs.” The words felt like stepping off a ledge; there was no taking them back once they’d gone. “I do not even know whether I will ever see him again,” she admitted, voice fraying. “Or whether I ought to. But if—if by some madness he still wants me, I must know whether I would be asking him to give up the one thing his whole life has been bent around.”

She forced herself to meet the doctor’s eyes. “And what I fear he needs most are heirs.”

Chapter 30

Chester had not known it was possible to miss a person in so many different ways at once.

He missed her on paper first.

Three letters, written and rewritten and finally sent to the Beaumont’s townhouse, had gone unanswered. The first formal, the second less so, the third so honest he’d sealed it before he could come to his senses. Each came back with the same neat line in a clerk’s hand: Her ladyship is indisposed and cannot receive correspondence.

He missed her in brick and glass.

On the third day back in London he went himself. Wyndale crest on the carriage, collar up against the cold, he stepped to the Beaumonts’ front door and handed his card to the butler.

“Her ladyship is not at home to callers, Your Grace,” the man intoned.

“I am aware she is not receiving,” Chester said evenly. “I didn’t ask whether she was at home.”

The butler’s eyes did not flicker. “I’m afraid I have my instructions, Your Grace.”

There were rules, even for dukes. He could break some. Trampling a lady’s household defenses in broad daylight was not one of them.

He turned away, jaw tight, and went down the steps to the street.

Halfway to the carriage something pricked between his shoulder blades—a sense of being watched. He glanced up.

On the third floor, behind the narrower window with the wavy panes, a curtain shifted. Just a ripple. Just enough to let a slip of pale face and darker hair appear in the crack.

He froze on the pavement.

Sea-green would not show at this distance, but the line of the cheek, the way the shadow moved—it was her. He knew it the way he knew where the flour sacks ended and the ledgers began.

He lifted a hand.

The curtain snapped shut.

The ache that had been a dull, constant thing since Brighton sharpened. He let his hand fall and walked back to the carriage, more slowly this time. He did not look up again. It felt too much like begging.