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Ah, yes. Grace had not felt it wise to put this part in a letter.

“Let’s sit,” she invited, frustration dissipating. “There’s more to tell.”

She told them about seeing the mill, entirely by chance, then about how she and Caleb had gone into the village to get local gossip about the event, only to learn that some man—some lord from London—was trying to sell the place. She glossed over the bit about her nightmares and her sleepwalking, it was true, but she paused to highlight how lovely Caleb had been through it all.

By the end, Frances was pale, Emily was worrying at a pleat in her skirts, and Diana was looking downright furious.

“Caleb has been rather accommodating, really,” she concluded. “He never expected that he was getting an elaborate intrigue when he married me, but he’s taken it in stride.”

“How is it possible that he really didn’t know any of the story?” Emily asked incredulously.

Grace had posed this exact question during the long hours in the carriage.

Caleb had shot her a sardonic look. “Did ye think we got the gossip pages delivered to us in the army,leannan?” he’d asked dryly.

“He had only just returned to England from fighting in France when he married me,” Grace explained now. “When my father alluded to the damage to my reputation?—”

“Which wasutternonsense,” Diana muttered loyally.

“—Caleb assumed this meant I’d been caught in some kind of dalliance. As he was willing to marry me anyway, he apparently didn’t feel compelled to ask for details. And I assume my father didn’t offer them because he, in turn, assumed Caleb already knew.”

“Or because your father didn’t want to bring up anything that might damagehisreputation,” Frances added—rather boldly, for her. The short time that Evan and his new bride had spent living at Graham House had, however, well acquainted her with reality. The Duke of Graham loved his career first and foremost. Everything else was a distant second.

“More likely,” Grace admitted. “He probably considered himself lucky to not have to discuss such sordid matters and washed his hands of it. All in all, Caleb didn’t know, I didn’t know he didn’t know, and so we were circling one another rather strangely until I revealed everything, whereupon he packed us off to London to resolve it all and—” She broke off, spreading her hands as if to sayand now here we are.

“Well,” said Diana, sounding frankly too pleased, given everything Grace had just disclosed. “I can’t deny that I absolutely despise the circumstances that led to this situation,but might I say that the present state of affairs is rather…romantic?” She said this last part with a distinctly hopeful note.

“No,” Grace said flatly, pointing at her friend, trying not to let it show on her face that she, too, needed the reminder. It had been tempting, when her husband lay with her in the dark, or when he’d looked so grimly furious at the mere idea that anyone would mistreat her, to think that he was doing this out of care.

But it wasn’t care; it was duty. And if Grace failed to remember that, even for a moment, she was risking an immeasurable hurt.

To Grace’s horror, Emily and Frances were looking at Diana speculatively, instead of incredulously.

“No,” Grace said again, with more emphasis.

Emily pressed her lips together like she was fighting back a smile.

“Very well,” she said mildly. Grace scowled at her. Somehow she did not think Emily was truly giving in.

Frances, meanwhile, had a dreamy look in her eye. “Of course not, darling,” she said sweetly. Grace sent her a scowl, too, just to be thorough.

Diana looked baffled. “Truly? Even with the way she talks about—oh,I see what we’re doing,” she said, catching on. “Yes,of course, Grace, your husband rushing off to vanquish your enemies is positivelythoughtlessof him.”

“I despise every one of you,” Grace said with feeling.

CHAPTER 20

Caleb was no stranger to hate. It was, in part, his birthright, was written into his blood and bones, had been inherited right along with his title, lands, and name.

So he felt confident in the emotion when he decided he hated Grace’s family.

“These so-called ‘reformers’ are little more than radicals, agitating for the mere sport of the thing,” the Duke of Graham pontificated over dinner. “The government should take decisive action and quelch the rabble once and for all. They think they can lead? Preposterous. There is a reason we have the House of Lords to head us up. Blood will out.”

Caleb, whose maternal birthright, by contrast, was an inborn Scottish distrust of anything the English government thought up, let alone when that had to do with ‘quelching the rabble,’ wanted very much to throw something. He resisted. Barely.

Grace, seated across from him, had a distant look in her eye, like she was mentally far, far away from here. The practiced nature of this look suggested that the duke was prone to such dinnertime diatribes.

The Duchess of Graham, meanwhile, gazed up at her husband with meek, trained devotion. She would periodically murmur something that was clearly agreement, though the sounds never fully manifested as words. Caleb got the impression that the woman felt that words—even of approbation—would be considered an unforgivable interruption.