Page 12 of Duke of the Underworld (Regency Gods #2)

CHAPTER 12

T here had been several definitive movements in Hugh’s life that had changed things, incidents that marked the before and the after .

There had been the fire when he was one-and-twenty which had left him, in the work of a moment, the duke and the primary caretaker for his young sister.

There had been the moment he’d looked at the ducal accounts and realized how deeply underwater those accounts were.

There had been the decision to open Underworld, for good and for ill.

But he was starting to think that none of these moments compared to the night that Persephone had waltzed into his club.

He heard her before he saw her as he waited for her and the girls in the entrance to their townhouse.

“Lucy, please. For the dozenth time, where is your bonnet? Martha, we will take no more than two books with us this afternoon. They are heavy, and we are not going on a months long journey. The remainder will be here for you this evening when we get home. Grace—Well, actually, Grace, you’re all set. Marvelous, thank you, darling.”

“You’re welcome, Aunt Percy,” Grace said, sounding extremely smug to have been praised above her sisters.

Hugh took the last moments before they came into sight to rearrange his expression.

He wasn’t jealous that the girls had taken to Persephone so quickly. That would be preposterous when he had married her for that precise reason—that, and the business of heir-making, though he wasn’t sure how he planned to do that if he never ended up taking the woman to bed.

His failure to do so was another sign that his life had been wholly upended by Persephone’s arrival.

Even if she was a whirlwind, that didn’t mean that he was envious of her. That was a reason to not be envious of her, as a matter of fact. He was a steady man. He didn’t take risks, not when he could avoid it.

Maybe that was why he hadn’t yet bedded her.

“All right, are we all here? Yes? Lucy . The bonnet goes on your head . Yes, thank you, sweetheart. Good. Shall we?”

A stampede of elephants would have made less noise than the girls rushing toward the front stairs. Hugh folded his hands patiently behind his back.

Lucy noticed him first—likely because her bonnet still was not properly fixed, and therefore was not occluding her line of vision. She skidded to a stop before the railing on the top balcony, something that made Hugh’s heart lurch in his chest, even if there were sturdy oak bars put there specifically to prevent anyone from tumbling over the edge.

“Uncle Hugh!” she exclaimed as her sisters joined her, pushing their little faces between the bars to peer down at him. “We’re going on a picnic! Aunt Percy said we’re allowed!”

“I know,” he said, unable to keep from smiling at her exuberance. He gestured to the picnic basket at his feet, then looked up at Persephone, who had come up behind the children. She looked as fetching as ever, her cheeks blooming pink and her eyes bright, no doubt from the efforts of corralling the exuberant children.

“You didn’t tell them?” he asked his wife.

She grinned impishly down at him. Christ, she was as bad as the rest of the household, determine to drive him mad with their playfulness and energy.

“I thought I would give you the pleasure,” she told him.

Martha caught on to what was happening before he could say a word, however.

“Uncle Hugh,” she breathed, eyes going wide with wonder. “Are you coming with us?”

Something about her surprise made his chest ache. No, it wasn’t something —it was the wretched, bloody necessity of keeping a distance from the children. They were only little girls now, but soon enough they would grow up into young ladies, and their reputations would matter. He could not send them out into the world knowing that the stains upon those reputations were from his own dirty deeds.

“I am,” he confirmed, pushing aside his worries. Just for today, he would push it all aside.

The ferocity with which the girls cheered would have warmed anyone’s heart—though he could not resist the brief pang of fear he felt when they ran, all three of them, pell-mell down the stairs to launch themselves into his arms.

“This is going to be the most fun day ever ,” Lucy exclaimed.

Hugh only hoped that he could make good on such a prediction.

For all his misgivings, however, the day went rather smoothly. Persephone did seem to give an awful lot of reminders—to Lucy, who seemed determined to misunderstand the proper use of bonnets, no matter how frequently she was reminded to tie her ribbons or keep it on her head or, no, Lucy, no, you cannot use it to gather rocks; to Martha, who seemed to think that reading while walking was something other than a recipe for disaster; for Grace, who simply needed to tell every single passerby that she was going for a picnic, a picnic with her uncle and new auntie, don’t you see, and weren’t they the luckiest girls?

Even with the pang that this last sent through him, Hugh was quite certain that, left to his own devices, he would have hurried the girls back into the carriage and made for home before they’d gone more than a dozen paces into the park.

Persephone, by contrast, seemed so exceedingly unbothered by these constant reminders—please don’t, Lucy; watch your step, Martha; let the good people go on their way, Grace—that she scarcely seemed to even notice giving them.

It was the oddest thing, truly. She was at once highly attentive to every step the girls made and simultaneously happily going about her day as if this level of raucousness was perfectly normal.

This made Hugh experience all sorts of inconvenient emotions, but he held tightly to the one that was easiest to bear.

This outing was confirmation, at least, that he’d chosen well in his bride.

“All right,” Persephone said when they’d come to a shaded nook that was out of the way of most of the bustle of the popular park. “This seems a good spot.”

She directed the footman who had followed behind them, cushions and blankets in hand, to set up their place, then lined up the girls in front of her with a mere wave of her hand. The triplets stopped what they were doing and stood with nearly militaristic precision.

Hugh gaped at this. Not one of the four young ladies in his company paid him any mind.

“We shall set up luncheon for when you are ready,” Persephone told the girls. “In the meantime, you may play. Do not touch anything that is living or used to be living. Do not eat anything that was not brought along with us for the picnic. Stay within the limits of these two paths.”

She sketched the area with a finger, the V shape of the intersecting walkways creating a neat little area that was bordered on the third side by their blanket and copse of trees.

“Do you understand?”

Martha and Grace nodded but Lucy—it would be Lucy—had questions.

“May we look at things that are alive?” she asked.

Persephone considered this. “If the thing in question is smaller than your hand, you may observe from a reasonable distance. If it is smaller than your smallest finger, you may observe closely. If it is larger than your hand, alert me or your uncle immediately.”

Lucy, in turn, considered this in a manner that made her look a great deal like Persephone—something that astonished Hugh, given their short acquaintance.

But perhaps this was yet more evidence of his correctness. Clearly the girls had latched on to his bride easily.

“I can do that,” she agreed, her little face serious.

“Wonderful,” Persephone said. Then she made a shooing motion. “Off you go.”

The girls went. Persephone settled herself onto the cushions.

Hugh gaped again. He was doing a great deal of gaping this afternoon.

“That’s it?” he asked, incredulous, when Persephone once again paid him no mind.

She frowned up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Well, yes,” she said. “I mean, we watch them, obviously. But they will learn all sorts of useful things by playing without us hovering.”

“Like what?” he demanded. “How to break their legs?”

Perhaps he hadn’t entirely left his worries at home, after all.

“No, you ridiculous man. They’ll—would you please sit down? I’m getting a crick in my neck?”

It was unfortunate, Hugh thought, that he found her outrage so charming. He sat, with only the most minor grumbling, beside her.

Persephone wore an extremely longsuffering look.

“By playing without us hovering,” she explained patiently, “they shall learn how to amuse themselves, and how to interact with one another on their own terms, rather than for the sake of the adults watching over them. It will help them manage minor quarrels between them. They’ll discover their own interests. In short, they’ll learn who they are. It’s a very important part of growing up.”

“You make it all sound so straightforward,” he lamented.

Although, he did have to admit that the girls looked rather charming, tripping along out in the sunshine like that. They appeared to have invented a game that involved one girl sitting on the ground with her hands over her eyes, while the other two skipped around her, singing a song that he couldn’t hear from this distance. At various intervals, with no discernible signal that Hugh could detect, the child in the middle would stand and swap places with one of her sisters, and the skipping and singing would resume. All three girls wore big, broad smiles.

Persephone’s smile was smaller.

“It is straightforward—and it isn’t. Right now, they’re playing happily. Later, they will be at war over something so trivial that neither you nor I shall be able to understand it, but it will be crucially important to them.” She shrugged. “Children are strange, fascinating little creatures.”

He looked at her curiously. “How do you know so much about them?” His wife had no brothers or sisters, which meant she hadn’t a passel of nieces of nephews from which to derive this experience.

She brightened. “Oh, I served as an aide at the village school near my father’s country seat,” she said. “For…four years, perhaps? My mother and I stayed in the country most of the year, though I did have a debut Season. My father generally traveled to London alone…though I suppose we now know it was to hide his profligacy.”

Her expression had darkened with this change of subject, and Hugh found he disliked it immensely.

“And you liked working at this school?” he asked, finding himself suddenly desperate for more of her smiles.

She brightened at once, and a band of tension around his lungs unclenched.

“I did. It was mostly younger children, learning their letters and their sums and the like—it was an agrarian community, so few of them stayed in school past ten or eleven. And the nonsense that arises when you put twenty or so small children in a room…”

She distracted him for a pleasant quarter of an hour with various anecdotes of the children’s creative troublemaking—though, he noticed, she kept one eye on the three playing girls at all times.

He hadn’t realized just how fond she was of children, and while that ought to have set him into a bout of self-congratulation—he really could not have chosen better for himself when selecting a wife, given that he needed a mother for his heirs and a doting aunt for the girls—instead he found himself mulling over how little he knew about Persephone.

She was the most fascinating little thing, his new bride. She was cheerful and stubborn, and she made the best of any circumstance in which she found herself. She did not seem to be rebellious for the sake of rebellion—she’d been concerned with her reputation, with her family’s reputation, when she’d first come to him. But she was willing to take risks with that same reputation when something mattered to her, like the girls, as she’d shown when she’d come to Underworld the second time.

He'd learned then, too, that she was mischievous in bed play, determined to resist him when he grew imperious and yet she shook with pleasure when he proved too dominant for her to withstand. And she made the most glorious sounds when she climaxed on his fingers and tongue.

Not that he should be thinking about such things in a public park, lest he get himself arrested for indecent exposure.

Indeed, given the choice of all the women in the world—which he’d nearly had, as a young, wealthy duke—he could not have picked better than Persephone.

And yet he had no sense of what she would have picked for herself in a husband, if she’d had anything resembling a choice.

The idea rankled .

“Aunt Percy!”

Grace’s shout tore him from his reverie about his wife, his heart racing in an instant, his body certain that the little girl had fallen into some terrible peril before his mind could catch up with the realization that the cry had been joyous, not afraid or pained.

Persephone suffered from no such instinctive panic, if her serene expression was any indication.

“Yes, Grace?”

“Do you know what flowers these are? I wanted to pick one to bring it to you, but Martha said I should leave it.”

Grace shot her sister a withering look. Martha was unimpressed.

“Yes, we should let flowers grow,” Persephone said approvingly, rising to her feet and shaking out her skirts. “Let me come look.”

She drifted off serenely toward the children, leaving Hugh to watch them from afar. All three girls clustered around her as Persephone bent to inspect whatever bit of flora they’d discovered, Grace leaning against her side, Lucy mimicking Persephone’s crouch, and Martha holding Persephone’s hand.

They loved her already, that much was apparent.

It made something inside him lurch with a feeling he dared not name.

After a robust, lively discussion about whatever plant life they were observing—at one point, Lucy threw her head back and her arms wide, expressing the magnitude of some concept—Persephone herded all three girls back to the blanket to eat.

They enjoyed a luncheon of cold chicken and warm rolls, small pats of melted butter waiting inside. There was a small glass dish filled with strawberries and raspberries lightly dusted with sugar—not that Hugh got a single bite, as the girls devoured these like it had been years since they’d had a meal.

“It really is unkind of you to starve these poor children,” Persephone said wryly.

“I’ve seen wolves attack with less ferocity,” Hugh added, uncertain if he was impressed or appalled.

Even after this feast, the girls found that they had plenty of appetite remaining for the jam thumbprint biscuits that the cook had packed for them. Persephone, who had apparently learned her lesson, snatched a few of these out of the packet before turning them over to the girls and pressed them into Hugh’s hands.

He was far more charmed than he ought to be by the gesture.

He was even more charmed when, once they’d finished eating and drinking—lemonade, just as Persephone had promised, and the good stuff, too, not the watered-down nonsense one got at balls—the children looked at him brightly.

“Would you like to play chase with us, Uncle Hugh?” Lucy asked.

He pretended to think about it.

“I’m not sure,” he said, tapping his chin. “What are the rules of this ‘chase?’”

Grace’s eyes were bright. “We run, and you chase us,” she informed him seriously.

He tapped some more. Beside him, Persephone had her lips pressed together tightly.

“Why am I chasing you?” he asked. “A good player must know his character’s motivations.”

Martha nodded solemnly, like this was a very good point, indeed. “It’s because you’re a monster,” she told him.

“A monster! What kind of monster?”

“The kind that eats little girls, of course.” This was from Lucy. Their answers came so swiftly and confidently that he had to wonder if they had rehearsed this ahead of time, or if they were just so naturally synchronized that they could invent make-believe games in perfect unison. “That’s why we’re running away.”

“That sounds very reasonable,” he said. “I shall remove my coat, whereupon I shall be this dreadful, little girl-eating monster. If I were you, I’d start running now, lest I catch you swiftly and gobble you up.”

He proclaimed all this with a somber tone, such that it took the girls a moment to parse what he’d meant. When he started to tug on the sleeves of his coat, however, they glanced quickly at one another with wide, delighted eyes, then bolted, shrieks of laughter following in their wake.

Hugh couldn’t say the last time he’d had as much fun as he did for the next half hour as he chased after the trio, feinting this way and that, making growling sounds to befit the most fearsome monster, letting the children slip through his fingers time and again as they laughed and laughed and laughed.

When he paused to catch his breath—the girls were much smaller and yet somehow, they seemed to possess far greater reserves of energy than he did, which struck him as nothing less than a medical marvel—he glanced over at Persephone. She was watching them with stars in her eyes.

Those stars were for the children, he told himself as he turned to respond to Martha’s taunts that he’d never catch her, not ever. They had to be for the children.

They just had to be.

Persephone had married a mystery.

Hugh was a duke, the owner of a gaming hell, a broad, commanding kind of man. He was twice as likely to frown as smile, but she’d also detected hints of a wicked sense of humor. He liked to be in control but—she blushed just thinking about it—he had also seemed to like it when he’d challenged her on, ahem, amorous matters.

And now, here he was, growling like he was some fabled creature, dashing about in his waistcoat, and overall making himself charmingly ridiculous.

All to entertain the three little girls that resided in his home.

Oh, but he was such a mystery!

“Do you see us, Aunt Percy?” Lucy called out as she darted away from Hugh’s grasp, her words scarcely comprehensible through her laughter.

“I do!” Persephone reassured her.

The fact that Hugh adored those girls was not surprising to her at all. He’d shown it, both by word and by deed, since she’d first met him. Yes, his form of love had been a bit overbearing, but he’d also been flexible when she’d shown him the benefits.

No, the part that was strange wasn’t that he wanted to be near the girls. The strangeness arose from the moment in which he seemed to try to keep his distance from them.

Mysterious. It was all very, very mysterious.

Persephone made herself focus on the mystery in order to keep at bay the silly little pang she felt in her chest every time she saw him grin at one of those children.

If he dared turn that grin on her…

No, she dared not even consider it.

The girls’ running was slowing a bit, their feints and darts away growing somewhat less agile, and no wonder—the five of them had been at the park for far longer than Persephone had anticipated when she’d proposed the outing.

Not that she had any objection. The girls’ governess was not due back from her holiday for several days more yet, so the children had nothing pressing on their calendars. Persephone’s schedule was, at least for now, their schedule. She knew that soon enough she would have to go out and about and do duchess like things—socialize, host dinners, go shopping—but she was in no hurry to do any of these.

The jump from impoverished baron’s daughter to duchess was dizzyingly far, and she would take whatever time she could to get her feet beneath her once more.

Besides, she liked the girls. She even mostly liked her husband, even if he did instill in her a number of inconvenient emotions.

She watched as Hugh, apparently noting the girls’ flagging energy, snagged Lucy around the waist and threw her over his shoulder like he was a baker and she a sack of flour. Grace, in a valiant attempt at a rescue, threw her arms around Hugh’s neck while he was bent enough to be within reach. This proved ineffective, as he merely stood, bringing the child with him as she clung and wrapped her legs around his broad back.

Not to be outdone, Martha wrapped herself around his leg on the opposite side where Lucy was held.

Persephone pressed her hands to her mouth as Hugh began to stagger toward her, his steps belabored by his three burdens.

“You’re moving rather slowly, there, Your Grace,” she called out merrily. “Is something hindering your movements?”

At her teasing words, the girls promptly began pretending they didn’t exist, growing even more limp in their uncle’s arms—and on his leg, in Martha’s case.

Hugh shot her a wry look as his motions grew even more laborious. He might have been a big man, but he was carrying at least nine stone of limp child.

“I am perfectly at my leisure, Persephone,” he called back.

His use of her given name after she’d used his title made her choice seem all the more ridiculous.

She’d merely been afraid she couldn’t use his name without blushing.

“I am glad to hear it,” she returned, foregoing nomenclature altogether. “By the by, have you seen three very silly little girls?”

“I have not,” he said somberly as he lowered himself onto the blankets—a frankly impressive show of strength, all told. The children had each pressed their face into various parts of Hugh’s body, but their giggles were still audible at the adults’ show.

“A pity.” She sighed theatrically, then lost her battle against blushing when she saw her husband’s gaze dart down toward her bosom. Quickly, she busied herself with the remains of their picnic. “I suppose we shall just have to enjoy the last of the lemonade ourselves.”

Three heads popped up so quickly that they seemed to be on springs.

“I want lemonade!” Martha said, eyes wide.

“We’re very thirsty,” Lucy agreed, shimmying until she freed herself from her position over Hugh’s shoulder.

“Oh, there they are,” Persephone said, purposefully keeping her eyes on her husband. “Did you know they were there?”

“I’m afraid not; they’re very good at hiding.”

The girls were unabashedly entertained by this, and Persephone tucked loose locks of hair and adjusted bonnet strings fondly. She adored that children were so open in their affections, and she was growing particularly fond of these specific children.

“In that case,” she told the girls, “I suppose we shall have no choice but to share our lemonade.” She poured and distributed the treat accordingly, then settled back comfortably into her pile of cushions.

She tried not to notice the acute awareness in her body when Hugh settled in beside her. They weren’t quite touching one another, but he was close enough that Persephone found she couldn’t ignore the possibility that they could be touching, if either one of them moved only a very small amount.

Such a thing would be terribly improper in public, however.

The girls had no such qualms about propriety or lack thereof; once their lemonade was consumed and their glasses set carefully back in the picnic basket, Lucy tucked herself comfortably into her uncle’s arms and gazed up at the trees.

Hugh glanced at Persephone with a look that was half alarm, half pride.

“Do you like leaves, Uncle Hugh?” Lucy asked dreamily.

“Leaves? Like on trees?”

“Mmhmm,” she murmured. “I like them. I think they’re nice. Like hair for trees.”

“Oh, yes,” Grace agreed, snuggling into Hugh’s other side. “And flowers are like their hair ribbons.”

Martha, apparently deciding that this conversation was not for her—or deciding that she had been patient enough without the promised story time in the park—propped herself on her stomach, feet kicked up merrily in the air, and pored over her book of fairy stories. Her sisters began inventing a fanciful story about trees getting dressed for the Season—which was why, Grace opined, they bloomed in spring.

Gradually, however, their conversation grew quieter and quieter before tapering off entirely. When Persephone looked over, she saw that both girls had nodded off, Lucy with her head upon Hugh’s shoulder, Grace leaning draped half across his lap. Martha, too, had succumbed to exhaustion; she was lying, arm draped above her head, next to her open book, each gentle exhale causing the pages to ruffle slightly.

And Hugh was rubbing gentle, soothing strokes up and down Lucy’s back, looking as though he had never been so contented in all his life.

Mysterious, Persephone thought again. Why did he keep himself away—and the girls’ shocked delight that he’d accompanied them that day indicated that he did keep himself away—when he so clearly longed to be near them?

But that was a question for another time. Maybe it was even a question she wasn’t entitled to ask. She didn’t yet know what the limits were, when it came to a husband who had essentially purchased her hand.

She was allowed to love the girls, however; she’d been very clearly tasked with that. So she felt perfectly entitled when she smiled at the three of them.

“They’re wonderful children, you know. You should be quite proud.”

His smile was small and absent, but it spoke clearly of a paternal sort of happiness.

“I am,” he said. “When the girls came into my care, I was not at all certain how I would manage, but we’ve muddled along well enough.”

She dared to probe a little further.

“But Daphne?” she asked, leaving things hanging enough that he needn’t answer if he didn’t want to. She wanted to know more, found herself surprised at the desperation with which she wanted to know more, but it was one thing to push for the sake of the children and another thing entirely to push simply because she wished to sate her curiosity. “She was with you since she was young, wasn’t she?”

“She was,” he agreed. He paused long enough that she thought he did not plan to say anything more, but then he sighed quietly and went on. “Do you know anything of the fire that afflicted my family—the greater family, that is, I mean? The Lightholders, that is.”

She shook her head, gently reaching over to close Martha’s book.

“The short version,” he said in an absent sort of way, as if discussing someone else’s history, “is that my grandfather, Cornelius, was rather dynastically minded. He had a son, his heir, and three daughters. He ensured that each of these daughters married a duke.”

“Including the Duke of Nighthall,” Persephone said.

“Just so. Twelve years ago, we were all gathered at the family seat—not my grandfather, he had already passed, but all four of his children, their spouses, and all the cousins. And a fire broke out in the night.”

He scarcely needed to explain more.

“How terrible was it?” she asked quietly.

He grimaced. “Terrible. We… We lost my father and two of my uncles. Four dukes and three of them died that night. Only my Uncle Jeremy made it out, of the four of them.”

“How old were you?” She wanted to reach out and take his hand, but didn’t dare. Not only was she loath to disrupt the sleeping girls, but she was not at all certain that such a gesture would be welcome.

“One and twenty.” His fingers rubbed gently over Lucy’s back. “Daphne was four.”

Persephone closed her eyes. Four years old . She knew other children suffered worse and at younger ages, but it hurt to think of sweet, good-tempered Daphne experiencing such a thing. She had been littler then than even the girls were now.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that’s…it’s worth almost nothing, especially after all this time, but… I am sorry.”

“It isn’t worth nothing,” he said, so quietly that she almost didn’t hear him. When he spoke again, his voice was as firm and strong as it ever was.

“Daphne and I muddled along,” he said. “I certainly made mistakes. I was young, not used to the title—not used to much in the way of responsibility, I’m afraid.”

Persephone found that astonishingly hard to believe.

Apparently, her expression conveyed her doubt, because he cracked a small smile.

“Yes, well, I was not the picture of a rakish young fop, I admit,” he said wryly. “But my obligations…they were hypothetical, not real. I had expected many more years before I was asked to put anything my father taught me into practice.”

A long silence stretched, more contemplative than uncomfortable, and Persephone could feel it twist out between them, a fragile thread of trust connecting them. He’d told her the truth. She would listen, would honor that.

“Well,” he said, looking out at the park rather than at Persephone. “I wish to do better for the girls, that’s all.”

Persephone strongly suspected there was more to the story, but she had better sense than to demand answers.

“We will,” she said instead. “We’ll keep them safe and happy.”

It was the right thing to say.

“Yes,” he said, as if merely saying so decided it. “We will.”

And perhaps it wasn’t all that mysterious why he had liked her words, for she liked hearing what he said, too. We . She liked being part of a we with him.

In the kind of perfect timing that seemed innate to children, Lucy took this moment to let out an adorable, tiny snore against Hugh’s shoulder.

Hugh looked so startled that Persephone needed all of her self control to muffle her giggles so as to not wake up the triplets. When he saw her laughter, he cracked a smile of his own, though he ducked his head as if to hide it. Persephone found this hint of bashfulness oddly endearing.

Her Dark Duke might be bold and fearsome, but he had a softer side, too. It was no surprise, given that he’d taken to his unexpected thrust into parenthood better than most might have done, but it was still very nice to see.

Now was not the time to dwell on it, however. Lucy’s precious snort was a good reminder that the shadows were growing long, the air starting to cool as night approached. Too much longer and this park would transform from cheerful daytime promenades to raucous carousing. It wasn’t a terribly dangerous crowd, given the neighborhood, but still. It wasn’t precisely the atmosphere for a bunch of little girls.

“Should we head home?” she asked.

Home . She liked that, too.

“Yes, of course,” he agreed. It was a slightly different spell that was woven between them as they carefully stood, Persephone trying not to admire the strength it took Hugh to get to his feet with not one, but two girls in his arms. Persephone needed help from the footman to raise Martha into her arms without jostling the little girl awake, though she carried the child herself.

They made their way back to the carriage under their sleep-soft bundles, the footman carrying their remaining possessions as he followed behind him.

Naturally, all three of the girls woke the very instant the walking part was over, no matter that Hugh and Persephone both laid them down on the plush carriage seats with utmost care.

“Did we leave the park?” Lucy asked, blearily rubbing her eyes. “I don’t remember leaving the park.”

“That is because you, my darling,” Persephone told her, “were fast, fast asleep.”

Lucy frowned. “I don’t think I fell asleep,” she said, even as she settled back against her uncle’s shoulders, her head lolling and her eyes immediately growing half-lidded.

“Did you remember my book, Aunt Percy?” Martha fretted.

“I did,” Persephone reassured her.

Grace, for her part, was distracted by one of the shiny buttons on Hugh’s waistcoat.

“I wish I had a button this shiny,” she breathed.

“I’m sure we can acquire a shiny button,” Hugh said, sounding as though he hadn’t the faintest idea what they were discussing. It was, Persephone allowed, an awful lot of chatter all at once.

Grace, however, looked up at him as though he’d promised her the moon in the sky.

“A shiny button!” she squealed.

This utter madness, with a minimum of two girls talking at once, continued all the way back to Lethon House. They were not two minutes away from pulling up in front of their house when two of the girls drifted off back to sleep.

Grace looked at her sisters with an air of unmistakable superiority.

“I would never fall asleep in the carriage,” she declared imperiously.

Hugh and Persephone looked toward one another, a shared look of amusement in their faces.

It felt like another thread spun out between them, one that drew them closer together.

Once they were back in the house, they enjoyed a dinner with three newly awake girls—Lucy and Martha had done an impressive repeat act of waking the moment they would not be asked to walk on their own two feet—and then, to Persephone’s delight, she and Hugh walked them up to the nursery for their bedtime.

She pressed a kiss to the scrubbed cheek of each little girl in her braids and nightgown, then laughed to herself again as she watched Hugh stiffly offer his own goodnight kisses when the girls insisted.

A warm, fond feeling filled her. It was all very…domestic, the way they’d moved through these routines as if they’d done so a thousand times before. The girls, too, seemed to accept their aunt and uncle’s affection as nothing less than their due.

“I love you, Uncle Hugh,” Lucy said, pressing a smacking kiss on her uncle’s cheek. “Goodnight!”

The child scampered off before Hugh could respond. Persephone suspected that if her husband was even a touch less dignified—or if he hadn’t had a beard to protect him—he might have been caught blushing.

“Would you join me for a drink, Persephone?” he offered when the children were handed off to their nursemaid for the evening.

It was a simple offer, but Persephone liked it all the more for its simplicity. It fit . Their day, it had been full of unremarkable pleasures, which, paradoxically, she’d always liked all the more.

“I’d be pleased to,” she told him.

They returned to the library, where Hugh poured them each several fingers of scotch.

He made to hand it to Persephone, but she wrinkled her nose.

“If I drink that, I shall be on the floor,” she told him flatly.

And she hoped this evening was going somewhere that meant she would need to keep her wits about her.

He looked at the glass as if, for a moment, he didn’t quite understand her words. She smiled at his perplexed look.

“You know, for a man with a house full of ladies, you know remarkably little about our habits,” she teased.

He scowled irritably at her, and there was probably something deeply amiss with her that she found that positively delightful.

“You said you wanted a drink,” he accused.

“Less of that, then add water,” she suggested.

His expression morphed to one of disgust. “That’s not a proper drink,” he said…but he did pour enough of the liquor into his own cup that Persephone would still be able to stand afterward, then topped it off with a glug of soda water from the waiting decanter.

Persephone hummed in pleasure as the bubbles fizzed against her tongue. Simple pleasures. That clergyman fellow who had invented it had been on to something.

Hugh watched her with a mingled sort of amusement and horror as he took a sip of his own undiluted drink. She hoped he enjoyed his mouthful of Scottish dirt or whatever it was they used to flavor scotch. She would take her bubbles.

She looked at him over the rim of her glass, the sharp scent of the liquor tickling her nose as she gathered her courage. She needed it, because she had to do something .

Ultimately, her only regret about taking the watered-down drink was that, when she leaned forward to press her lips against his, she could not blame the drink.

And she did so desperately wish for something else to blame. For Hugh kissed her back, at least at first. She tasted the Scottish dirt on his lips and everything.

But then, just as she leaned in a little further, just as she dared to open her lips a touch?—

He pulled away.

For a brief, humiliating moment, she didn’t understand. She thought—she truly thought—that his objection was one of location, that he would say something like a hero in a novel. Perhaps we ought to take ourselves somewhere more comfortable . Later, this thought would strike her as unforgivably foolish. Hugh was no romantic hero. Even the dark, wicked ones were far more dramatic than her stoic, serious husband.

But for a second, she believed it. Long enough to say, “Should we…?”

She let the offer hang, because she’d assumed that he would pick it up, would guide them. Instead, it dangled, dangled.

And the threads that had been connecting them snapped.

“Persephone,” he said in that horrible breath after she realized what was actually happening. “We shouldn’t?—”

“Right, yes, of course,” she said in a rush, pushing to her feet and depositing her nearly untouched drink on the table. “Yes, it’s been a very long day. We should retire.”

“Persephone,” he said. This time it was conciliatory, sympathetic, and Persephone could not stand to listen to it. It was too mortifying.

“Goodnight!” she called over her shoulder, practically racing for the door.

She thought he might have called her name once more, but she didn’t listen.

Her sole accomplishment, as far as she could count it, was that she made it all the way back to her bedchamber before she began to weep bitter tears of rejection.