Page 96 of The Good Duke
Her heart thumped this time with an unwelcome unease. Dread tightened her belly.He is turning me out after all.“What is it?”
“There is something of the utmost importance I must speak with you about.”
“Yes,” she prodded, cutting him off, just wanting him to get on with it already.
“She cannot be named Chloe.”
Persephone cocked her head in abject confusion. “I…”
Simon gestured to the dog seated on her hind legs and staring adoringly up at him. “She cannot be Chloe because I courted a young ladyalsonamed Chloe.”
“Oh.”
Suddenly, it made so much sense: the reason her friend of old had become the cynical rake he had. It accounted for the protective walls he’d built during their years apart.
He’d had a former love. One named Chloe. And an irrational part of Persephone resented that woman for having had his heart.
Not thatPersephonewanted Simon’s heart. She absolutely did not. For that matter, she didn’t want anyone’s heart. She’d played the game of love and lost mightily.
Nay, this had nothing to do with jealousy ofSimon’sChloe. Persephone simply despised knowing he’d loved a woman who’d been undeserving of his affections.
“You were in love with her,” she said gently when she trusted herself to speak.
Simon blanched. “Egad, n-no.”
“Simon,” she said before she recalled her own rule on using one another’s familiar names. But during this intimate discourse, she couldn’t bring herself to refer to him by his title. “It is all right. Everyone, at some point or another, has suffered a broken heart.” She spoke from a place of experience.
Simon snorted. “I was a mere pup. She loved Shakespeare.”
“As do you.”
“Precisely.” He seemed to register what Persephone implied. “No. No. No,” he said in rapid succession. “Not that she wasn’t lovely. She was. She is,” he corrected, that amendment even worse. “Very much so.”
Persephone hated lovely-very-much-so Chloe even more.
Simon came to his feet, and they resumed walking.
“My father had died shortly prior to that courtship,” he explained as he and Persephone walked through the market. “I felt a sense of obligation to find a countess to carry on the line.”
And now, it was about Simon finding a wife so that he might be free of his responsibilities in London. He’d attempted to marry two times—that she knew of now—but never had those been the right reasons.
As they walked, Persephone considered a young couple standing alongside a flower vendor. The young woman was tall, striking, and with a distinct scar upon her cheek that leant an air of even greater beauty to her. The gentleman was tall and charming and blond, and, judging by the adoration in his gaze, hopelessly in love. Just then, the man plucked a pink rose from a basket and held it near his sweetheart’s nose.
Persephone and Simon continued by until the couple faded behind them.
“Very well.” Simon cast her a sideways look. “Out with it.”
He’d read her thoughts just like he’d always been able to do.
Persephone guided them to a stop and stared up at Simon with an earnest gaze. “Has it ever occurred to you, Simon, that you can actually know the greatest joy in finding a duchess who is…someone you are desperately in love with?”
“You believe I can find a lady of thetonwho I’m desperately in love with?” He laughed.
She frowned. “It is not so very hard to believe—”
“I find itimpossibleto. Any woman who is favorable of my suit only does so because she covets the role of duchess and certainly not out of any true affection for me.”
“You do not know—”
