Page 65 of My Deceitful Duchess
She made no response, but he knew the answer already:No. She trusted few, and men did not rank highly upon that list. Perhaps hewas at the very bottom, but he knew also that she would consider thathecould be trusted with his own child. Thathehad never once raised any sort of objection to her work, and that he was unlikely to do so in the future.
“Only think on it,” he said. “You cannot raise a child in Ambrosia—but my home is just across the mews. You wouldn’t have to leave London. You could haveeverything.” Everything that should have been hers from the very beginning. Everything she had never dared to hope for. “In fact,” he said, “I would ask only one thing of you.”
Her head tilted in silent inquiry. “Oh?”
“Sundays,” he said. “I would like you to spend them with me.”
Chapter Thirty
Jenny pored over the inventory, scratching down a fresh list of any stock growing too short, struggling to keep her mind on her task instead of—thatothermatter.
She didn’t know why she had let it affect her so profoundly, why it should be anything to her but an insult, and easily dismissed. She didn’twantto wed him.
But she didn’t want to wed anyone else, either. And that was the problem. Soon to be an evenlargerproblem, coalescing like a snowball rolling down a hill. Sooner or later it would hit her—crushher, even.
Lottie and Harriet had come up with a list; alist, they’d said, ofeligible bachelors. Five names upon it, and she’d known none of them. They were men of character, they’d said, respectable men who had had little luck on the marriage mart. Men who were looking for mothers to their children, or men who had been widowed already with no children to show for their marriages. Men who would welcome a woman of some wealth—even one who would come to them with someone else’s baby in her belly. The chanceof an heir, even if it were not one of their own blood.
But she didn’tknowthem, and once the necessary papers had been signed, that would beit—her life would become whatever they deemed her worth. Whether that was a pleasant, if distant, marriage, or confinement to the countryside. Her life, wrenched once more from her hands. Trapped again within the yoke of a man who did not love her.
While Sebastian—
He would never lift a hand to her. He would not interfere with her running of Ambrosia. He would even want her child, because it was alsohis. It should have been the perfect solution. A paper wedding for a sham marriage. They did not even have tolivetogether. She hated that—that she could trust him with everything but herself. She hated that he had offered her everything she had ever wanted, save that one thing. She hated that if he had offered herlove, she would not have believed it. She hated that he had given her a choice that was not a choice at all.
She hated most that there was a part of her, however small, that still loved him. At least, that loved the man she thought he had been. That he had seduced her so thoroughly that it hadkilledsomething inside her to be betrayed. That at some point she had stopped expecting it, that she had begun to trust him. That even when she had been cast into jail, still she hadmournedwhat she had lost.
If he had asked her to marry him before, she would have agreed. They might have beenhappy. No—shehadbeen happy.Theyhad been happy. She had been happier in the throes of an illicit affair that she had ever been in the whole of her life. And now all that was between them was obligation, the wreck and ruin of something that had once been beautiful and now was only a mangled, brokenthing. And still it bound them both.
But then, her life had been just an endless cascade of one bad turn into another. Only a series of disappointed hopes until at last she had stopped hoping altogether. If she had to be married—and shedid—at the very least she could go into it with her eyes open, with no expectations whatsoever.
After all, absent expectations, she could not be disappointed.
∞∞∞
Saturday arrived, and Jenny did not visit the bakery. She was still raw from Sebastian’s proposal, such as it was—still aching for the possibilities that had been lost to her through his lack of faith. For the trust that had snapped neatly between them. It would take time for the sharp edge of it to blunt, she knew. The rift would not mend, but in time it would cease to hurt.
Still, two brioche buns had been delivered to her regardless. She hadseenthese, because the staff had brought them to her. They were not, after all, the profiteroles she had disclaimed. She knew they were an apology of sorts, perhaps for the profiteroles he’d ruined for her. But she did not want them. And she had gone to sleep with that resentment burning in her heart; the hurt, the loss, and the love she wished she could exorcise rolling into a murky miasma that penetrated even her dreams.
She slept uneasily, anxiety creeping even in her subconscious—until late afternoon when there was at last a scratch at the door, pulling her up through layers of clinging sleep until she said, scratchy-voiced, “Enter.”
“Beg pardon, ma’am.” Betsy, one of the reception staff, said as she slipped into the room. “But you have a caller.”
Jenny pushed a pillow over her face and groaned into it. She’d hadnocallers—not for years and years. And now she wasinundatedwith them. Well, at the very least it could not be Nerissa Amberley, and that was something.
“Who is it?” she asked, shoving the tangles of her hair away from her face.
“She wouldn’t say, ma’am.” A little fidget, a bit of hesitation. “She said if she gave her name, you might not see her.”
Odd choice of words. But Betsy had not recognized her, or she would have said—and that meant whoever the woman was, she was not a patron of Ambrosia, at least. “Did she say what she wanted?”
“Only to speak with you,” Betsy replied. “She seemed…a kind sort. Not alady, I don’t think—leastwise, not one with a title. But kind.”
Well, there wasthat, she supposed. “You may show her into the office, Betsy. I’ll be along shortly.” She cast the covers off as Betsy slipped out the door, and made to dress, throwing on a simple lavender gown and pinning her hair up in a neat twist. With any luck, she could still catch an hour or so more of sleep once hercallerhad left.
The office door opened beneath her hand, and a woman sat there on the couch in the seating area, her hand curled around a cup of tea. Jenny was certain she had never seen her before, but there was something familiar about her nonetheless. She was in her early fifties, if Jenny had to guess, with hair that had gone more grey than gold. Impossible to gauge her height when she was seated, but she wore a sort of matronly air, and the scent of cinnamon and vanilla hung around her—like biscuits fresh from the oven.
“You must be Madame Laurent,” she said, rising at last as Jenny swept inside, with an easy smile.
“Yes,” Jenny said, closing the door behind her. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me there.”
