Page 67

All their lives, Diana had always known what to do.

Even if she was not completely certain, she acted as though she was, and somehow, they scraped through. She had gotten it down to a fine art, and Samantha both admired and envied her for it as everything had gotten more difficult when she married the Duke and left her sister behind.

Samantha was not as good as her older sister had been at making everything work. She was fine, and she had gotten herself as far as her sister had gotten, but she couldn’t help but think she had needed more luck than Diana had.

“Is it luck to have been blackmailed into marriage with a good man?” she asked when her sister visited.

Her sister, usually one to be present in a conversation, was playing with the curtains and turning up her lip.

“Diana?”

“Yes?” she asked, her attention snapping back to Samantha.

“Did you hear me?”

“I… No. My apologies, Sister, but this household is…”

“A work in progress?”

“You could say that, yes.”

The two sisters laughed gently.

“I asked you if it was luck that got me into this situation. I was blackmailed into marriage, but it is a marriage with a good man.”

“Well, when you speak of luck, it is not necessarily good, but I like to think that your fortune comes from the choices you make.”

“I certainly did not choose to be threatened.”

“No, but you chose to be in your cups and enter the Duke’s bedchambers.”

“Diana!”

“It is the truth! And whilst you may not have chosen to be threatened, you chose how to respond to it. You chose to marry the Duke, even though you could have ruined yourself at any time and spared yourself from being his wife. Therefore, this is a choice that you made, and there is hardly any luck about it. Why do you ask?”

“Because it has all been so sudden. I thought that the Duke hated me, but after it had all happened, I realized that he did not, and I thought that you would hate him, given how protective you always were over me, and then…”

“And then I liked him. Is that what you mean to say?”

Samantha thought back to the evening they had all spent together and the burning she felt when her sister liked Graham and how it had felt even worse when those feelings appeared to be reciprocated.

“Please do not be angry with me,” Samantha began.

“I do not have it in me to be angry with you. It all left when you ran away. Why would I be angry with you anyway?”

“Because… when you met the Duke, it seemed as though the two of you liked each other more than either of you liked me. It is perhaps the most childish that I have ever felt, but it is the truth. I was unsure of how the Duke felt towards me, and he had been cold at first, but with you, it was so easy to make him laugh and enjoy himself.”

She waited for Diana to give her a look or even laugh at her, but all she seemed to do was stare back at her.

“Samantha,” she said carefully, “did you see how the Duke was looking at you?”

“No. I could not bring myself to look at him.”

“Then you are a fool,” she said at last, laughing. “Sister, it was only because he looked at you so longingly that I dared show him any kindness. Well, that and the fact that my husband and I had to promise each other to show him some grace, even if we felt as though he had been plotting something.”

“Plotting something?”

“We had to think of every possibility. I knew how against marrying you were, and I wondered if he knew that but wanted to marry you regardless and did not know any other way to convince you.”