Chapter 28

TWENTY-EIGHT

X avier had already disappeared by the time I made my way back up to the main floor of Corbray Hall. Stupid long legs. Honestly, I wondered sometimes if the man was half giraffe, he was so tall.

I immediately headed for his office on the second floor, only to run smack into Georgina.

“I—oh, Georgi—I mean, Your Grace,” I corrected myself, albeit through my teeth.

I knew the title was official, but for some reason, addressing Georgina as a duchess didn’t feel much different than calling Sofia a princess just because she was wearing a tiara and a sparkly dress.

“Francesca,” she said through a thin half-smile as she fluffed her hair. She was dressed as elegantly as ever in a pair of cream trousers with a navy blouse and tasteful pearl and diamond earrings dangling from her ears.

“Excuse me,” I said, in a hurry to find Xavier and make things right.

But her voice called me to a stop.

“It won’t work, you know.”

Ignore her , I told myself. You can just ignore her. You don’t have to engage.

Unfortunately, good manners won over better judgment.

I turned at the landing a few steps above her. “I’m sorry? What won’t work?”

That haughty smile reappeared, this time showing a bit more teeth. “You and my stepson. It’ll never work.”

I frowned, took a step downward, then another, so we were nearly eye to eye. Everyone in this place was taller than me, so I needed the extra height.

“I’m not sure that’s really any of your business,” I ventured.

“Not my business? Darling, please.” She waved a manicured hand. “ All of this is my business. This is my legacy. And if you really think I’m going to allow a pikey little Yank with a bastard brat to become the next Duchess of Kendal, you really haven’t learned a thing on this adventure of yours, have you?”

My mouth fell open. “I?—”

“Look at you,” she continued, gesturing up and down my body. “We’ve done our best to help, but you’re still a hopeless mess. Dressed in rags, hair like a dirty black mop, horrid posture, manners like a caveman.”

I straightened at her comments. “Now wait a?—”

“And don’t get me started on your dancing, my girl,” she said. “Best leave that to the ones who grew up learning it.” She cocked her head and took a step up so we stood on the same stair, giving her at least six inches on me. “You know, I never realized it before, but you really are quite tiny, aren’t you? Beside the duke, you practically disappear. Or at least look more like his child than a partner ever should.”

It was like she had a dashboard of buttons that she could push to link directly to every one of my insecurities. Button one, height. Button two, class. And so on.

But I had one card left to play.

“I’m still not sure why you care so much who Xavier ends up with,” I said much more confidently than I felt. “After all, it’s common knowledge you’ve been trying to overturn the entail for years, haven’t you?”

She looked at first like she very much wanted to slap me. But then, it was as if a wave of calm swept across her genteel features, leaving behind that typical mask of supercilious knowing.

“I see my son has been chatting,” she replied as she examined the tip of one French nail. “Bad habit he’s formed since starting university.”

“Don’t think Xavier doesn’t know,” I warned her, more than ready to knock the woman off her high horse.

“Oh, of course he knows.”

Okay, maybe not.

“Why do you think we’ve never got on?” she continued. “He fits in here only slightly better than you do, and that marriage certificate is almost certainly a farce. I’ll prove it one day, I’m sure of it. But until then, I won’t have my son’s sullied by the likes of you.”

I sneered. “Because you’re so much more knowledgeable than the queen or all of Parliament, for that matter?”

“When it comes to my late husband, I rather surmise I am,” she said. “And Rupert would have no more married his cook than Xavier will marry a schoolteacher.” She bent down so her steely gray eyes were directly in line with mine. “The fact remains that you are merely a dalliance. A passing fancy, which, if Xavier’s recent temperament is any indication, has long grown stale. And whether he stays the Duke of Kendal or my son takes the title, one thing is true. You , my dear, will never be a duchess.”

“You—you don’t know that,” I said, though my voice was already quivering. After all, hadn’t Xavier just said the same thing in his own way?

“Please,” she said serenely. “You have a child together. If he was going to ask for your hand, it would have happened long ago.”

Georgina straightened and continued down the stairs while I just stood there numbly, trying to relocate my legs. When she reached the bottom, she turned once more and looked me up and down, like she could see the doubt seeping through my pores.

She hadn’t heard our arguments, I told myself. She hadn’t seen anything. It was all in my head, and meanwhile, I knew Xavier and I could at least try to make things work if that was what we both wanted.

We had to. We were a family.

Or at least, we could be.

“The writing’s on the wall,” she called. “It’s only a matter of time. Best cut him loose and move on before he does it for you.”

I stood frozen on the stairs, clutching the carved banister for what seemed like an hour before I finally managed to tamp down the tears and stop myself from running after Georgina. Tearing apart her perfect coif and finding whatever shred of self-esteem I had left.

But what she thought ultimately didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter if the Dowager Duchess of Kendal didn’t believe I had what it took to stand in her admittedly perfect shoes.

It didn’t matter if she thought I was nothing more than an uncouth American who belonged in a barn more than a country manor.

I sniffed. Shows what she knew anyway, if that were true. I was born and raised in New York freaking City. This entire manor was closer to a barn than the house where I’d grown up.

Anyway, the only person’s thoughts that mattered were Xavier’s.

And I hadn’t given up on us yet.

I jogged up the rest of the stairs, then, with more self-assurance than I’d had since arriving at Kendal, navigated the maze of corridors with their contemptuous portraits and priceless antiques until I had found my way back to Xavier’s office.

Where I heard another prim, collected voice speaking to him inside, audible only through the crack in the slightly open door.

“Honestly, Kip. I’m worried about you. We all are. I’ve never seen you this unhappy, and you really don’t deserve it.”

I froze in place at the sound of Imogene’s saccharine voice floating through the door. I wanted to go in. But the thought of facing her after I’d just dealt with Georgina left me cold.

I turned to leave. But stopped when I heard Xavier’s response.

“Maybe I don’t deserve happiness.”

I swallowed. Normally, if someone said something like that so overtly, I’d accuse them of fishing for compliments. I’d suspect that they were just self-deprecating to get others to rain praise.

But I knew Xavier. He was more prone to keeping things bottled up to explode than stating how he felt, for attention or otherwise. The fact that he was saying this at all broke my heart even more.

“You can’t be so hard on yourself,” Imogene told him. “It’s not your fault if she doesn’t appreciate Kendal.”

“Isn’t it?”

I winced. I could just imagine him sitting there, shoving his hands into his dark hair and rubbing his temples the way he did when he was stressed. Sometimes he let me rub them for him. We would sit on the bed together, me leaning against the headboard, him laying back on my chest, my legs wrapped about his waist. I loved the warm, solid feel of his body pressing mine into the mattress and the way his head would rest on my chest while I worked. And then, most rewardingly, the heavy sigh of relaxation when my fingers coaxed his worries away, enough where, just before he fell asleep, he would turn over and reward me with a sweet, drowsy kiss.

I never imagined I would be the reason he needed that kind of release, though.

There was some shuffling in the room, and I heard footsteps on the herringbone wood floors. Light taps of a woman’s heels as she paced.

“Kip, no one respects your sense of adventure more than I do, truly,” Imogene said. “You opened up your life to someone whom, let’s be honest, you hardly know. You took a great big leap with her. But it’s not your fault, darling, if she couldn’t leap so far. It isn’t.”

There was a loud, unintelligible grumble, but no argument.

“She is unhappy,” Xavier gave in at last. “I just can’t seem to get it right.”

“I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but perhaps you need to. Francesca, lovely as she is, may simply be one of those people who can’t be happy, no matter what the circumstances. I wish it weren’t true, but there it is.”

“No,” I whimpered to myself, then bit my comments back.

Tell her she’s wrong , I wanted to screech. Tell her that’s not me. Tell her that while we have so many challenges, we can absolutely be happy. Perfectly, beautifully, blissfully in love, in fact. We’ve had it before, and we can have it again!

Or maybe I was just trying to convince myself.

“Did you hear something?” Imogene wondered.

I sucked in a deep breath and backed away from the door, on instinct plastering myself against the wainscoting when the door opened and I saw Imogene’s head poke out.

She looked down the opposite direction and halfway toward me before backing into the office again without another glance.

I exhaled, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. Why shouldn’t she see me?

Why was I feeling like the intruder here?

I listened to the sound of her shoes clipping again across the floor.

“There’s nothing out there,” Imogene said. “Nothing at all.”

Xavier didn’t respond.

“As I was saying, though, look at everything you’ve offered her,” Imogene continued as if nothing had interrupted them. “The clothes, the houses, your entire life. Not to mention the fact that you, Kip, really are a catch. Horridly handsome—don’t give me that look, you are —and impossibly charming when you want to be.”

I practically bared my teeth. This bitch .

In the back of my mind, I could easily picture all my sisters’ faces at those comments. Joni was probably removing her earrings, Kate her glasses while all four of them readied themselves to pounce.

God, I wished they were here.

“This life is one most women would salivate after,” Imogene said. “And you’ve offered it after knowing her for what, six months?”

“Five years,” Xavier corrected her testily, showing for the first time a bit of annoyance. “A little more now, actually.”

I smirked. Take that, you snooty cow.

“Right, of course,” Imogene corrected herself. “Except…”

“Except what?”

“Except, well, it hasn’t really been five years, has it? You had a brief fling with the girl—and I’m not judging, Kip, really, I’m not. We’ve all had our larks, haven’t we? Only, that means that most of that time since, you didn’t know each other at all, did you? Meanwhile, she goes and has a child without saying a word. Putting aside how dreadful that really was, she also made things so much harder for herself than they needed to be. Now, I ask you, does that sound like someone who wants to be happy?”

Say no , I begged silently. Say you understood why I did it. Say we’ve evolved so much from that first revelation, that we mean more to each other and can get through anything together.

“I just don’t know anymore.” Xavier’s voice was weary, as tired as my own heart felt. “I love her. I do. But everyone I love dies, eventually, don’t they? My mother, Lucy, Father. Now Henry.”

I clutched my chest. Oh God, that couldn’t be how he really felt, could it? I hadn’t ever considered that the amount of death and loss Xavier had experienced would have affected him that way, but now it made sense.

He gripped us so tightly it hurt.

Maybe it was because he was afraid of losing us.

“Maybe being with me is killing her too,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, in a way. She doesn’t belong here.”

I silently hiccupped back a sob. No! He had to know it had nothing to do with him!

“Kip, listen to me,” Imogene told him. “If she can’t see what’s good about you and be happy with it by now, she never will. And you deserve to be with someone who appreciates you for how wonderful you truly are. Someone who is strong enough to take on this life, with all its challenges.”

He snorted. “And who might that be, eh?”

“You really don’t know?”

My eyes flew open. No , she was not . It was clear that the time for eavesdropping was over. And the time for action was now.

I flipped around and opened the door, prepared to tell this stupid, conniving wench that if she wanted to see an unhappy version of Francesca Zola, she was about to get it right in her perfectly straight nose.

But as soon as I entered the room, I stopped in my tracks.

And watched with horror as Imogene tenderly cupped Xavier’s dejected face.

Shuddered as she leaned down through a waterfall of her perfect golden hair.

Quaked as she set her glossy pink lips to his.

And felt my heart split into ten thousand pieces as he remained still and let her.

I backed away from the door with a stumble that was swallowed by the thick rug protecting the floor of the hallway. Moving purely by instinct, I ran back the way I’d come, getting lost approximately four times before finally locating the main stairs, taking them two at a time without really knowing where I was headed.

Sofia. I needed to find Sofia. Needed to ground myself in her sweet, sweaty scent and unicorn chatter. Remember my true raison d'être in this world, no matter what happened here.

And after that…shit, what was I supposed to do?

Ideas were flying through my mind when I rounded a corner toward the main entrance and once again ran straight into Georgina.

“What the devil—” she sputtered. “Oh, it’s you .”

“Georgina,” I said. I was finished with the titles. I was finished with everything about this place, including her. If she would help me with just one thing.

Though she started at the use of her given name, she seemed to sense my desperation. “Yes?”

“I—” I swallowed. “I want to go home.” I glanced up the stairs, terrified for a moment that Xavier might see me and stop me from doing what I now knew was right. “I just—I want to go home. As soon as humanly possible. Can you—would you help me?”

She cocked her head, looking up the stairs where I had come from and back down at me. Then a distinctly evil smile that made my blood run cold spread across her face.

“Yes, of course,” she said quietly, almost so low no one else who might have listened could hear. “You find your darling little girl. I’ll have Gibson pull the car around and take you to the heliport. Ten minutes, and you’ll be on your way. The rest of your things will be sent home shortly. Will that suffice?”

Still sniffing back encroaching tears, I nodded. “Y-yes. And you’ll tell no one else where we’ve gone?”

Her smile only broadened, making her resemble a very beautiful, satisfied crocodile.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, my dear,” she said. “Now, off you go.”