She loved him.
She always had loved him.
Her heart had known from the moment she had seen him, even as a girl, that he was the man for her, but she couldn’t have him. And she wasn’t going to bang her head against the proverbial wall, trying to make him see her as his future duchess.
No, she’d always just be Jack to him, despite their kisses. And the sooner she married, the better. She’d longed for him long enough.
Chapter Twenty
“My dear, is the Duke of Stone going to ask you to marry him?”
The question sent her scroll of music to the floor, and before Edward could snatch it up again and abscond with it, she picked it up, praying she could compose herself in time to meet her mother’s gaze.
Her eyes sparkled as she continued, “It would be positively splendid if he did. I have always liked him.”
“No, Mama,” Jack protested, hoping to quell such speculation before it could truly take root. The idea of her mother being disappointed after so much grief was unbearable. She clutched the scroll of music, one of her father’s favorites, and resigned herself to her mother’s question. “He is not going to ask me to marry him.”
She stared at her for a very long time, rearranging the soft blue hydrangeas on the table beside the pianoforte. “Are you certain, my dear? He does seem to have an affinity for you. Though, it has been but a few days since he last asked you to dance.”
A knowing smile tilted her mother’s lips as she considered the flowers and carefully moved one. “You two were such good friends as children.”
“Mama, childhood playmates do not make future husbands and wives.” It was all she could not do to crush her precious music in her grasp. Instead, she smoothed it out and placed it atop the polished wood of the vastly inferior instrument they had now.
Truthfully, she was simply grateful she had something to play at all.
If they were not careful, the bailiffs would be around to collect furniture soon.
“Oh, I don’t know,” her mother mused. “Your father and I— ”
She shook her head, her heart aching at the idea of her father and how happy her parents had been before it had all gone so terribly wrong.
As if sensing her sorrow, her mother paused, then crossed to her. Gently she took her hand and said with a voice marred by pain and love, “Your father made a great many mistakes, my dear, but he was a good man. And I loved him dearly, as all you children did. As we still do.”
Of course she loved her father, as did her mother, as did they all. And she knew that he’d been a mere human trying to make their lives better and failing tragically at it.
It was an unfair thing in this life that a person could wish for something so intensely that they themselves were the cause of their own misery. So had been the case with her father.
She would have to take a lesson from her father’s book. She wouldn’t be the instrument of her own destruction.
Her mother smiled gently through unshed tears. “I want you to know that, love. And the duke—”
Jack drew in a long breath and gave a terse shake of her head. “Not the duke, Mama. He doesn’t believe that love is a good thing in marriage.”
“Impossible!” Her mother tsked. “He is so kind. So gracious. And I saw how you looked after you spoke with him just now. I saw the way he looked at you when you were dancing. My dear—”
“No, Mama,” she protested. “All the looks in the world will not counter his will. A will which has decided. I do not know if he will ever marry. But if he does…it will not be to someone like me.”
“Someone like you?” her mother prompted.
Someone he could love.
The thought whispered through her like sin. Like temptation. And it wasn’t pleasurable. It was agonizing. He liked her. She knew it. He cared, too, for he wished her to be happy.
And he desired her.
But whatever had happened to him all those years ago? He was still being guided by it. And the power of whatever had made him distrust love forged him still.
She could never marry a man who was so afraid of love. She could no longer take the risks she had been taking.