To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke #8)(7)

“Mama, your glasses.”

Eleanor turned her attention to the small, golden-curled girl who held her spectacles in her small, delicate fingers. At just seven, Marcia was that something. That person she’d sacrifice anything and everything for. Including her sanity. Managing her first real smile that day, Eleanor accepted the wire-rims and placed them on her face. “Why, thank you.”

“Are we almost there?” Excitement tinged her daughter’s words.

She’d once shared this same eagerness to leave the countryside and enter the glittering metropolis. What a na?ve fool she’d been. Her smile fell. “We are, love.” Unfortunately. “Almost, there,” she murmured, throwing her arm around her daughter’s small shoulders and bringing the girl close to her side. Eleanor dug deep for strength.

“Ouch, you are squishing me.”

Tamping down the nervousness churning in her belly, Eleanor forced herself to lighten her grip. “It’s because you’re so very squishable.”

Marcia giggled. “Is it because you are excited?”

The familiar stone in her belly, formed somewhere between her father’s death, her aunt’s missive, and the arrival of the Duchess of Devonshire’s carriage, tightened. “Oh, indeed,” she managed at last.

A spirited glimmer lit Marcia’s eyes. “I am ever so excited, too, Mama.”

Regret tightened in her chest. “Did you not wish to remain in Cornwall?” Hadn’t Eleanor, with her late father’s guidance, carved a life that her daughter found joy in?

Marcia pumped her little legs back and forth. “Not forever, silly.”

With a sigh, she absently stroked the top of her daughter’s soft crown of curls. Yes, there had been a time when the thrill of the unknown had taken hold of her. She’d been full of fairy tales and dreams of magic and mystery and intrigue. Her heart tightened. And for a brief, very brief, moment, she’d known the joy that came from that grand adventure. His grinning visage flashed to her mind’s eye, as it sometimes did. Eleanor pressed her eyes closed and did not thrust the memory of him away, as she often did. This time, she accepted the memory of Marcus, the Viscount Wessex, and let it wash over her with a familiarity born of yesterday, even with the passage of time.

He’d been her dream. He’d been the joy and the excitement. And in one shattered evening, nothing more of him remained…but the memory. Unease churned in her belly. By the very nature of his family’s connection to her aunt and his residence alone, the risk of meeting was great. As such, the reality of that brought thoughts of him back with a shocking frequency…and when the first missive had come from her aunt, Eleanor had allowed herself an infinitesimal moment of hope—the hope of seeing him.

Her gaze trained unseeingly upon the carriage bench opposite her, she let open the gates she’d constructed to keep him out. Since their parting, she’d become a woman who confronted life with frankness. So it was the honesty she insisted upon that she acknowledged the truth—she missed him. And she always would. Nor was it just the memory of innocence she’d known in their time together. She missed what could have been. His smile. His laugh. Who they’d been when in each other’s company.

Marcia tugged at her fingers and she glanced down distractedly. “What is it, dear?”

“Are you thinking of Grandfather?” Wide brown eyes stared back at Eleanor.

Sadness stuck her hard for altogether different reasons. “I always think of Grandfather,” she murmured noncommittally, and it was true. Gone just six months now, there was no better father, nor could there ever have been a better man than he was while living.

“Someday you’ll meet again,” Marcia said with entirely too much maturity for a child of seven. “He promised we would and he would never, ever lie, Mama. So don’t be sad.” She laid her head against Eleanor’s arm. “And remember what he said. ‘Goodbyes are not forever.’”

They are just temporary partings.

Marcus’ visage flashed behind her eyes. Once more. Perhaps it was her return to London, a land they’d lived in together, back when she’d been innocent and smiling and he’d needed laughter, but she could not extricate the thoughts of him from her now. Nor had that goodbye been temporary. The day she’d boarded her aunt’s carriage and made her return to Kent, unchaperoned, alone, and broken, she’d known with an absolute certainty, for all her father’s beliefs on goodbyes, the final one between her and Marcus had, indeed, been a forever goodbye.

And she wagered for the love she carried of him still in her heart, he would feel no such fondness for the woman who’d broken his heart.

“We’re here.”

“Hmm?” She blinked and then glanced about before her daughter’s words truly registered. Her heart dipped somewhere to her toes and she plastered a smile onto her face, fearing the forced grin would shatter and reveal her a charlatan once more.

Married war widow. Grand lie.

Smiling, oft-happy mother. Sometimes a lie.

Thrilled to return to London. Absolute lie.

Seeming unaware of the tumult raging through Eleanor, Marcia bounced up and down on her seat, clapping her hands together excitedly. “Oh, Mama, it is to be the grandest of adventures.”

Regret pulled at her heart. For Marcia, it should be a magical experience. Yet, the sad truth was mother and daughter’s presence here was no mere familial visit. Though Eleanor had exchanged nothing more than letters with Aunt Dorothea over the years, the woman had proven herself the same benevolent relative who’d taken Eleanor in for a London Season. Now, however, Eleanor would come to her as a poor relation, in desperate need of salvation.