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Chapter 3

It took all of Diana's focus not to touch her lips. She clasped her teacup in her hands so tightly, she worried it would break.

The impulse was ridiculous, of course. She couldn't still feel anything, not all these hours after her…encounter. Not to mention that if she reached up to touch her lips, to marvel at this new use for them, Emily and Frances would notice.

"Are you all right, darling?"

Diana blinked. Drat. Apparently, Emily had noticed something off in her attitude.

Diana forced a smile to her lips. "Of course," she said airily. "Of course. I'm just…distracted."

"Distracted?" Frances prodded, nibbling at a biscuit. Frances was a prodigious nibbler; Diana had never met anyone who could make a small morsel of food last so long. She wondered if this came from Frances' place at the bottom of the list of approximately a thousand siblings, per Diana's best count.

Since she did not wish to see either of her friends choke to death on their tea, Diana did not reveal anything about the mysterious gentleman from the previous evening. Instead, she offered something that wouldn't surprise them though she knew it would not please them, either.

"I have a new lead in the Duke of Hawkins' case," she told them.

The frowns were immediate.

"Diana," Emily said chidingly, "not this again."

As Emily frowned down at the teacup she held with perfect elegance, the other hand was idly tucking a curl back into her coiffure. Poor Emily was constantly in a battle against her natural curls which were as unruly as Emily was upright.

"You aren't doing anything dangerous, are you?" Frances fretted.

Diana gave her best reassuring smile. It grated that her friends didn't agree with her regarding the late Duke of Hawkins' innocence—in the crime of murdering Grace, that was. Diana herself would never have called the man innocent. But her friends didn't accept what felt so obvious to Diana: that culpability was not a blanket condition, and that a man experienced in illegal endeavors was likely to be smarter about not getting caught by the hangman's noose.

Diana avoided Frances' question.

"There's a warehouse by the docks that belonged to the previous duke," she explained. "Except it wasn't listed under his name, not officially." She reported her findings, ignoring the deepening horror on her friends' faces.

"Diana," Emily said, visibly aghast. "Tell me you didn't go to this warehouse alone."

Since Diana did not think Emily would find it more comforting to learn that, in the end, Diana had not actually been alone, she said, "I was perfectly safe, Emily."

It was only the teeniest, tiniest little fib.

"Diana," Frances was wringing her hands. Her friends always said her name too much when they were scolding her. It was quite the annoying habit. "That was frightfully daring of you."

"Please, darling." Emily leaned forward to clasp Diana's hand, her brow furrowed in consternation. "Please give this up. I know you think there's more to learn, but please ask yourself—truly ask yourself—what would happen even if you did find some hint that the Duke didn't harm Grace? You could never question him; he's dead. And this quest of yours…it won't bring Grace back."

She looked so sympathetic. It set Diana's teeth on edge.

"I know that," she gritted out. "That's not what this is. It's about bringing the true culprit to justice!"

"But what if the true culprit was brought to justice?" Frances said quietly. "What if all this really is is the pain of losing Grace?"

Diana hated that, too, the implication that she was just blinded by her grief. She grieved Grace; of course, she did. But she was also right. She knew it in her bones.

"I don't think it will ever stop hurting." Emily's hand still held Diana's. "It's horrible that the Duke died without saying where we could find?—"

She broke off. Grace's body. That was what Emily couldn't say.

She cleared her throat and carried on. "It will always be painful, knowing that there are some mysteries we cannot solve. But I think the only way we can try to move forward—not to forget, just to live as you know Grace would have wanted us to—is to try to look ahead instead of lingering in the past."

Diana shouldn't have been surprised at this reaction from her friends, and she wasn't surprised, not really. And yet, being told—again—that she ought to just let it go, ought to just move on…

It deflated her.

She slumped back against the settee, her posture spectacularly unladylike.

"I'll probably have to," she said sullenly. "My parents have decreed that I am to be wed."

"What?"

The shriek—it could not be termed anything else—that came from Frances' lips was so unexpected and so uncharacteristic that both Emily and Diana stared at her in shock.

Frances flushed bright red then frowned at them. "Apologies," she said. "But, well—you ought to have led with that, Diana!"

Emily turned to face Diana, too. "That's a fair point. Tell us everything. Immediately."

And really, perhaps Diana was as oblivious as the mysterious gentleman had implied because it was only then that it fully registered how little she knew.

"I, well…" Hm. How embarrassing. "Well, that's about it, actually. My mother came into the breakfast room yesterday and said they had arranged a marriage for me."

"To whom?" Frances demanded.

"She did not specify," Diana said primly.

Frances frowned, but Emily—drat her experience at sniffing out deceit, courtesy of her hellion sisters—gave her an incisive look.

"Did you request specification?" she asked with a mildness that was frankly insulting.

Diana sniffed, not really believing that this would serve as a sufficient reply. Emily held her gaze for a moment longer then the two dissolved into laughter.

"Oh, Diana," Frances said, catching on a beat later, "you didn't even ask?"

"I was distracted!" Diana cried. Perhaps she wished that her friends would show more support for her investigation, but at the end of the day, having Frances and Emily around her made everything better. "I was thinking of how a husband would curtail my investigation!"

"So, naturally, it did not occur to you to inquire which husband would be curtailing your investigation," Emily chortled. "Oh, Diana. Only you."

A similar comment from her mother would have been a censure, but when Emily said only you, it felt quite like I love you.

"Are they not all much the same?" Diana retorted. Then she grew somber. "I think I am perhaps afraid to know," she confessed. "If he agreed to deal with my parents alone—if they don't seem inclined to tell me his name… Well, it can't be a good match, can it?"

"Perhaps that's not the reason," Frances said, ever the optimist. "Perhaps he is someone your parents think a poor match, but you will find wonderful. Mayhap they've chosen someone who—who…" She scrunched her nose, then held up a triumphant finger. "Who secretly pens mystery novels in his spare time. His hobby makes him seem a recluse, but it's merely that he is so prolific with his pen."

"Perhaps," Diana said doubtfully. She didn't want to crush Frances' hopes by saying that, more likely, her parents had chosen based on title alone and not cared that her husband-to-be was old, infirm, cruel, or all three.

As if summoned by her daughter's mere thoughts, the Countess of Preston chose that moment to poke her head into the drawing room.

"Diana, there you are," she said, voice disapproving as if Diana had somehow let her mother down by merely existing within her own parlor. She spared Emily and Frances the barest glances. "Girls."

"Good morning, My Lady," Frances said politely as Emily echoed a similar sentiment.

Diana's friends were always kinder than her mother deserved, given that the Countess had no patience for either of them, disregarding them as wallflowers and nothing more. She was unmoved even by the argument that, as a Marquess' daughter, Frances outranked Diana; the Countess took Frances' shyness as a sign that she would never advance far in live.

It was this kind of attitude that left Diana with little hope that whoever her parents had chosen for her to marry was someone who would meet with Diana's approval.

The Countess ignored the greetings.

"Diana," she said instead, clearly impatient, "what are you wearing? That gown is dreadful." Diana glanced down at her perfectly regular morning dress. "Go put on the green walking dress we purchased last week from Madame Celine's. The Duke is coming."

The three friends exchanged glances, eyes wide in matching expressions of alarm. A duke? What duke? Diana's mind raced. Every unmarried duke she could think of was ancient.

"The Duke?" she echoed.

Oh, Lord, what if it was the Duke of Kinsbury? He was eighty-nine years old! Though, perhaps that meant he would want a companion, rather than a wife in truth? That didn't sound good, but Diana supposed it could be worse…

Instead of answering, her mother sighed as if Diana were being purposefully obtuse. She crossed the room and snatched her daughter by the arm, tugging her towards the door.

"There's no time, Diana! Girls, you shall have to see yourselves out," she called over her shoulder to Emily and Frances. "Diana, you must come dress at once. My goodness, your hair is a disaster. Is your maid going blind?"

Diana shot a panicked last look behind her at her friends.

"We shall call tomorrow," Emily whispered as Frances nodded in fretful agreement.

With extreme reluctance, Diana let herself be towed to her bedchamber, her pleas for more information falling on deaf ears.

"For God's sake," the Countess snapped, shoving Diana roughly down onto the bench in front of her vanity. Bridget was looking at Diana's maid, Annie. "Can you make her look like a proper young woman instead of a vagabond for once?"

"Mother!" Diana exclaimed.

She was, once again, ignored.

"I am late to my own toilette because I have spent half the morning searching for you, Diana," her mother complained. "Do try to do your family some credit, will you? The Duke will arrive in half an hour."

Then she sailed out the door.

Annie, a freckle-faced Irish girl who was a happy collaborator in Diana's schemes as long as she was appropriately bribed, blinked rapidly.

"The Duke?" she asked, hairbrush already in her hands. She quickly began plucking out hairpins she'd arranged in Diana's hair scant hours before. "A duke is coming?"

"It would seem so," sighed Diana.

Half an hour. Half an hour until she met her fate, dismal though it was likely to be. She decided to be judicious in her hopes. As long as her betrothed wasn't overtly awful and resided in London—her heart gave a lurch at the thought that she might be separated from Emily and Frances, banished to the wilds of Northumberland or some such far-flung locale—she wouldn't complain.

Even if she wanted to. Even if she really, really wanted to.

As if sensing Diana's disquiet or more likely reading it on her face—Diana had never been adept at hiding her feelings—Annie kept up a pleasant, distracting chatter as she carefully re-curled and re-pinned any errant locks of Diana's hair. She reported the contents of a recent letter from home which had contained the latest about her brother's feud with his neighbor's daughter over where their sheep could graze. Annie had long been of the opinion that her brother and the daughter were in love.

Usually, Diana found this saga highly diverting. Now, she could scarcely summon a smile over the neighbor's daughter rising in the dead of night to mark a boundary between the pastures.

Annie trailed off her narrative and gave Diana a sympathetic glance through the looking glass. "It'll be all right, My Lady," she said soothingly, even though she couldn't possibly know such a thing. "You're so clever, you could find a way to make the most awful situation into something fine, couldn't you?"

"Thank you, Annie," Diana murmured. She wasn't convinced, necessarily, but the sentiment was nice.

Despite Bridget's complaints, Annie was a dab hand at hair, and Diana had a coiffure worthy of a ballroom within twenty minutes. It was just on the right side of too formal for a morning visit (even a morning visit with a duke) which Diana knew was precisely the line her mother would wish her to walk. The Countess of Preston did tend the slightest bit towards the pretentious.

And, indeed, when her mother came to fetch her, the Countess did not find any flaw in Diana's appearance, a fact about which she seemed half pleased, half put out.

"Well," she said, casting her daughter an appraising glance, "I suppose you'll do."

And then, again, she was dragging Diana down the hall. Diana was getting quite tired indeed of being dragged hither and yon. Yet, as was to be expected, her yelp of, "Mother, please stop yanking!" was met with, alas, more yanking.

The yanking only ceased when Diana was positioned as her mother preferred on the second from bottom stair leading into the front hallway. Diana had heard countless lectures on why the second from bottom stair was the ideal place from which to receive a gentleman suitor. It was high enough to make Diana look elegantly tall without making her look too tall. It set her blonde hair nicely against the polished, dark wood of the staircase. It implied that she was in motion—Diana had never gotten a satisfactory answer for why this was a desirable quality—emerging with perfect timing just as the gentleman arrived himself.

"There," said her mother with some satisfaction. The Countess' perfect spot was the third from bottom stair as she was several inches shorter than her daughter. She fluffed a curl carefully. "Now you shall look just a picture when the Duke of Hawkins arrives."

The floor fell out from beneath Diana's feet.

"Excuse me?" she said. Her voice sounded very far off as she blinked up at her mother.

Later, she would wonder if she should have seen it coming. On one hand, leave it to her parents to do the most underhanded thing possible. They were fairly desperate to get Diana out of the house, annoyed that she hadn't already married and gotten them the social cache that was the entire purpose of having a daughter, after all.

And it almost made a twisted sort of sense. This was why her mother had avoided any mention of the gentleman's name. She had been purposefully keeping the information from Diana until it was too late for her to make a fuss. Diana should have seen through that subterfuge in an instant.

On the other hand, however, how could she have anticipated this? It was absurd. Unthinkable.

It was cruel, downright cruel, to expect Diana to marry the son of the man who the whole world believed to have murdered her friend.

Of all the terrible, wretched outcomes Diana had imagined when she thought of the kind of man her parents might have chosen for her, this was the worst. This was the worst possible choice in all the world.

Except, as it happened, it was even worse than that.

Because just as Diana's jaw dropped, as a gasped "Mother!" came out of her mouth, a knock came at the door. The butler, forewarned of the imminent arrival of their esteemed guest, leapt to answer it.

And in entered the gentleman Diana had kissed in the alley.

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