Chapter 27

CHAPTER 27

" I 'm back now; you're going to have to find your own place to hide out."

At the sound of Grace's voice, Evan lifted a weary arm from where he'd draped it over his eyes as he reclined on the decidedly uncomfortable wrought iron bench in the conservatory.

"This was the only thing I missed about this house while you were gone," he told her as she shoved and cajoled him until he made enough room for her to sit beside him.

"Do bachelor lodgings not come with ridiculous indoor forests these days?" she asked in mock surprise. "What has this country come to?"

He pursed his lips at the mockery of their father's common complaint. The Duke of Graham was a staunch conservative who constantly lamented the insistence of progressive parliamentarians to "modernize" Britain.

Evan supposed he understood the impulse, even if he didn't necessarily share it; why would a man who had benefitted so magnificently from the current state of the system wish to change it even an iota?

"I know," Evan said, echoing his sister's affect. "What next? Letting women in Parliament?"

Grace pressed her hand to her chest. "Parliament? Where they make laws ? No, my fragile constitution cannot abide the thought of such a thing."

She feigned a swoon, and Evan wrapped an arm around her so he could squeeze her briefly against him.

She was back. His sister was back .

"I know why I'm hiding," he said when he let her go, "but why do you need a place to hide?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Mother," she confided. "She followed me around for a bit this morning, wailing my name some more."

The duchess had done as much for a long time the night prior.

"And then she looked at me," Grace went on, "sighed, and told me my dress was years out of fashion, and didn't I want to go with her to Bond Street so we might rectify that? And then Father overheard and said, no, we could not go shopping, not until he determined how to inform everyone of my survival the right way. Which of course made Mother an absolute wreck for not thinking of that, which set her to wailing again. So, I left."

Evan winced with each sentence. It seemed impossible to imagine that his parents would turn to thinking about image within a single day of their daughter's unexpected return, but the duke had always been single-minded, and the duchess had always been biddable—which had led her to be single-minded in her pursuit of making her husband's life as easy as possible at all times.

"Well, I don't care about your dresses or who knows what and when," he promised fiercely. "You're back and that's the only thing that matters."

Her smile at his vehemence was a touch bashful. "Thank you," she said softly. "I just… I know I won't forget it, but I'd like to just pretend like the last few years didn't happen. I want to see my friends again. I want to kiss that baby who stole my name. Time felt like it froze, back at that awful mill. Every day was the same. Chores, food, stolen sleep. It wasn't a life. I want to have a life again. I want to feel alive again."

"You will," he promised. He didn't care what it took. He would make it so. "Father is no doubt…scheming, or whatever it is he does when something surprises him. He'll find some way to make this mess paint him as a hero, and then he'll relent. You will go back to your friends. You'll become part of Society again. You'll kiss baby Grace."

"I demand that baby be adorable," Grace muttered. "We have a reputation to uphold."

"I'm sure she is," Evan assured her without any basis at all. He found that most babies looked a bit squashed, but perhaps this one was old enough now that it had improved. What did he know? "It will all come. It just requires a bit of patience."

"I've been patient," she grumbled, which, he felt, was fair. "I don't want to have to wait for Mother and Father to make everything fit the way they want it to. This isn't my debut before the queen; it's not some Society event. I just want to be home again. I just want them to be pleased that I am back, not Lady Grace, the duke's daughter."

Evan's heart ached for her. He'd never been close with his distant parents, but Grace hadn't seemed to feel the sting of their coolness quite as sharply as he had, perhaps because she'd always had him. For her to feel it now, after everything she'd gone through, seemed simply unjust.

"It's not you," he tried to reassure her. "They're just?—"

"Always like this?" Grace supplied. "Yes, I thought perhaps I'd remembered incorrectly, but they really always have been this consumed with the way others think of them, haven't they? It seems exhausting."

Her comment brought Evan's mind, for the thousandth time that morning, back to Frances. Frances, who abhorred scandal and who had, by his carelessness, been thrown to the wolves with her family.

Did she feel as tired and overwhelmed as his sister looked? Had her family been relieved to know she was safe, or had they immediately begun chastising her? Should he go to her, or would his presence make things worse?

With effort, he forced his attention back to his sister, someone he knew needed him.

"In fairness," he said, "Mother does seem worn out by it. Father thrives with the pressure, though, I think."

Grace scoffed. "Indeed. The great dukedom of Graham. May we never forget it."

There was a hint of bitterness in her tone and Evan wished, not for the first time, that he knew how to ask her about her time in captivity. His failure to do so no doubt spoke to some unforgivable cowardice on his part, but he simply could not find the words.

Before he could make a clumsy attempt, Grace shifted the topic of conversation.

"I'd ask why you're hiding if it weren't so dreadfully obvious," she told him.

"It is not," he protested, purely on instinct.

This was the point where Grace started shoving him again. He only realized what she wanted when he sat upright—apparently a precondition to whatever she had in mind—and she stopped abruptly.

"You could have just said what you wanted," he grumbled, sounding more like an irritable child than a grown marquess. He was, he knew, setting a terrible precedent that he would no doubt come to regret, but he found it delightful to be lightly bullied by his sister again. He had missed her so dreadfully.

"Oh," she said, wide-eyed and innocent. "So you can say things that are nonsense, but I am meant to say precisely what I mean."

"I didn't push you, " he argued, to precisely no effect.

She ignored him.

"You are hiding," she informed him pertly, "because you are upset about a certain petite redhead."

"I am not," he lied, "upset about Frances."

She batted her lashes at him. Goodness, she was annoying. It was marvelous.

"Don't you mean Lady Frances?" she asked, tone saccharine.

She was trying to trick him into revealing something, but he was the elder sibling and a man and too clever to fall into her traps.

"I do not," he said firmly. "I have never called your friends by their proper titles. I am incorrigible that way. Please feel free to ask Diana or Emily, whom, you will note, I am presently addressing by their Christian names."

Grace was unmoved by this ironclad logic. "You did always call Diana and Emily by their Christian names," she agreed in a way that made him think he perhaps had fallen into her trap after all. "But never Frances, because she was terrified of you. And the woman I saw these past few days did not seem terrified of you. She was apparently comfortable enough in your presence to accompany you on a highly scandalous trip to the middle of nowhere."

"Perhaps we've become friends in the years since you've been gone," he said.

"Oh, that makes sense," Grace said, looking at him with a sorrowful expression. "So then you know about Pettigrew the cat?"

He looked at her closely, but her expression gave nothing away. "Yes," he said carefully. "What an…interesting animal."

Grace nodded even more sadly. His pulse raced. Had he answered correctly?

"I was sorry to hear he died," she said, swallowing hard against some emotion. "Frances told me when we were at the second inn. To think, I only missed his passing by mere months. Poor Pettigrew. Poor Frances. But they had so many good years together."

"Indeed," he said, still very carefully. "She was very sad."

Any trace of sadness vanished from Grace's expression. "There is no Pettigrew, you ninny. That was a test, and you did not pass it at all . I know you aren't friends with Frances. I know you and she… Well, actually, she's my friend and you're my brother, so I'd rather not speak about it. But rest assured that I know ."

The idea of his sister knowing about Evan's…relationship with Frances was so horrifying that he spluttered another denial, no matter that he knew it would not be well received.

"There's nothing to kno— ow! Will you stop kicking me ?"

Today, at least, she was wearing a pair of slippers instead of the sturdier boots she'd worn the previous afternoon. Her angle was also rather worse than it had been in the carriage. And yet, he really wished she would desist committing violence against his person.

"I will stop kicking you when you stop being unbearable," she told him. "It's obvious that you have yourself properly twisted up about her. What's not obvious is why you're sitting here brooding about it instead of doing something."

He wanted to deny that he was brooding, but he was afraid she'd kick him again. So, he—albeit very reluctantly—decided to answer her question.

"I—" He grimaced, uncertain how to explain himself, but soldiered on when Grace started looking as though she were contemplating violence again. "I am concerned about her family's reaction. I did not, ah, plan adequately for our return to London."

"It was quite terrible," Grace agreed with only the slightest hint of sympathy. "But then again, her parents never were the best, given how they always ignored Frances. Truly, how could someone not adore Frances ?"

He almost agreed before he realized she was no doubt trying to, once again, trap him into an admission.

"Before we learned of the handkerchief and came to find you," he found himself confiding instead, "we were at a house party. Her parents seemed very determined to see her wed. I fear what they may be saying now that a real potential for scandal is upon her."

And then, before he knew it, he was telling her the whole story. Or, well, most of the story, though his sister did give him a speaking glance when he mentioned his growing admiration for Frances.

"Good Lord, Evan," she said, blowing a golden curl out of her face with a frustrated huff of breath. "Thank goodness I've come back."

"Well, yes," Evan said, because of course he was glad about that. "Though I can't say I see how it's related to what I've just told you."

"Men," she complained. Then, in one of the finest non sequiturs he'd ever heard, asked "Diana and Emily are married now; are their husbands idiots? I know you're friends with—" She waved a hand. "Benedict, Earl of wherever, Emily's husband now. But is he as completely brainless as you're being right now?"

"No," he said, defending both himself and his friend.

"Well thank goodness for that," Grace said acidly—and pointedly. "Because I couldn't have all three of my friends married to fools."

"All three—?" He rubbed his temples. Had she always been so confusing? Surely she hadn't always been so confusing. "Grace, I am begging you. Please just tell me what you mean, preferably with limited insults to my intelligence."

She sighed as though he really was asking for too much.

"Evan," she said simply. "You must marry Frances."

Her words struck him like a falling hammer. And, unlike so many other times in this conversation, no denial leapt to his lips.

Previously, marrying Frances had been so out of the question that he'd not even let the thought cross his mind. Marrying anyone had been out of the question. He'd been left hollowed out by losing his sister. Grace had, for the majority of his life, been the one person he could confide in, the one person with whom he could just be Evan, not Evan Miller, Lord Oackley, future Duke of Graham.

Without Grace, he'd feared even having feelings, not when he would be trapped to navigate them entirely alone. He'd had no space in his heart for emotion, not when he'd been so full of pain over the injustice of his sister's murder.

Except she hadn't been murdered. She was here. Alive. With him again.

And, he realized as he thought about it more, Grace's words breaking something open inside him, she wasn't the only person with whom he'd let his guard down.

Frances had—entirely against his wishes, mind—broken through his defenses. Even when he'd thought he'd despised her, even when he'd thought her a traitor to his sister's memory, he'd been inexorably drawn to her. And then, once he'd learned she wasn't conniving or petty, once he'd learned that she was funny and clever and delightful and so beautiful that it made his chest ache when he looked at her?—

Well, he still couldn't think of marrying her, because he was a man who'd scarcely climbed his way out of a pit of sorrow, one who had a sister who needed him, one who was letting things slip between his fingers. They'd come back to London, and he'd simply forgotten to protect Frances' reputation.

But if all that meant he must marry Frances…

"I can't," he said, wondering if the words would feel true if he spoke them aloud.

Grace heaved an enormous sigh.

"You can," she said after a long pause. "And you should. But I cannot make you. You are your own man, Evan, and that isn't a bad thing. But…"

"But?" he prompted when she didn't immediately continue. Some part of him wanted her to say that she was making him, that there was no other choice, that this was the only way forward. Because if marrying Frances was something he had to do…

Well, then it saved him from admitting to himself that he wanted to marry her. Saved him from admitting that he was terrified of the idea of marrying her. Saved him from risking pain, saved him from worrying he wouldn't be enough, saved him from trying to rake through all these feelings alone.

He'd felt alone for so long.

You didn't feel alone with Frances , something hopeful inside him whispered.

Grace's eyes contained fathoms when she looked at him again. They spoke of wisdom beyond her years.

"If you delay," she said, "you will lose her. If you deny her now, you will lose her. And if you really, truly don't care for her, perhaps that's best. It might be better to let her weather this storm now, rather than find herself chained to you for the rest of her days, when neither of you wish for that."

Evan hated every syllable of that idea. "But?" he prodded, hoping she had further advice to give.

Finally, a small smile graced her lips. "But," she continued, "I have learned that there is no guarantee of tomorrow. You might not get a second chance. I never thought I'd see you again—never thought I'd see Frances, or Diana, or Emily ever again. But I'm here. I'm going to see them all. And I intend to remind each of them how very much I love them. And I love you, too, you great idiot brother of mine. I want you to be happy. And judging by the look on your face when you look at her—not to mention how brightly she blushes whenever she catches you looking—I think the two of you might just make one another happy."

Evan wanted to believe this, but he wasn't sure he knew how to do so without risking the part of himself that he'd protected so fiercely since that first, stomach-dropping moment when he'd realized someone had snatched his sister from under their noses.

‘She's a redhead," he mumbled, unable to stop himself from pressing on this emotional bruise. "She blushes at everything."

"I will kick you again," Grace threatened. "But fine. If you are determined to be such an utter child about this, remember that only you can save her from scandal now. The choice is yours."

A smile started to spread across his face. He wasn't certain, not truly. But he wanted to see Frances. He wanted to help her. And if that meant he'd get to have her—in his home, in his life, in his bed—for the rest of his days?

Well. That was an enticing prospect indeed.

"I have to go," he said, rising quickly to his feet.

"I thought you might," Grace said smugly. Yes, Evan would be hearing about this moment for years to come, but just then, he found he didn't care. Let his little sister gloat as much as she wished.

He didn't even pause to retort. He was already halfway out the door.