To Woo a Widow (The Heart of a Duke #10)(12)

“Whatever happened?” Chloe asked, in her always-curious tones, as she propped her hip on the back of Philippa’s seat.

“Mama stepped into a rabbit hole,” her daughter helpfully supplied. “Because she was looking back at Miles,” she added. Unhelpfully.

Silence resounded in the large parlor and Philippa’s cheeks blazed hot. With her daughter’s reduced hearing, Philippa had long believed Faith had honed other skills. One being her ability to see everything about her and, in this particular instance, she’d witnessed and now shared Philippa’s improper regard of the marquess. “I was not staring at him,” she said softly. Rather, she’d been staring after him. Entirely different things. Weren’t they?

Of course, Mother broke the tense quiet blanketing the room. “Who is Miles?” she blurted. When no one was quick to reply, she looked between her daughters. “Who is—?”

“He is the Marquess of…” Faith wrinkled her brow. “Milford? Or was it Guilford, Mama?”

“Guilford,” she said weakly. For the course of her daughter’s five years, Philippa had quite celebrated in Faith’s willingness and ability to freely speak. Having long had her voice quashed by a cruel father and an unkind husband, she’d appreciated the joy and beauty in Faith’s garrulousness. This moment, however, was decidedly not one of those times.

“The Marquess of Guilford?” her mother parroted back.

Warming to the curious stares trained on her by her grandmother and aunt, Faith puffed her chest proudly. “He carried Mama.”

Once more, silence reigned. Only this time, it came with probing, piercing stares. And the last thing Philippa wanted, needed, or desired was a probing, Edgerton inquiry.

“Who carried your mama?”

She swallowed a groan as Gabriel stepped inside the room. Blast and double blast.

“The Marquess of Guilford,” Chloe supplied.

Philippa leaned forward and touched her daughter’s cheek. “Faith, run abovestairs to the nursery,” she urged.

Her daughter opened her mouth to protest, but Philippa gave her a lingering look that ended the request. “Very well,” she said on a beleaguered sigh and skipped around the furniture. She paused in the doorway alongside Gabriel, the Marquess of Waverly.

“Uncle Gabriel,” she said, dropping a proper curtsy.

“Hullo, Faith.” He ruffled the top of her black curls, in a gesture so at odds with the coolly removed brother he’d been through the years. Then, the man she’d come back to live with, now married and so blissfully happy, had been transformed. Something tugged at Philippa. Something ugly and dark. Something that felt very much like envy. “Did you have a nice time at the park?”

“Oh, yes,” she called up. “I picked flowers with Miles.”

Which only earned Philippa further probing stares; this time from the eldest Edgerton sibling. She managed a smile. Of course, there would be questions. There always were with the Edgertons. Ironically, those same kin had failed to ask the most important questions about her hopes and dreams of a future. Faith slipped from the room and Philippa collected the until-now forgotten embroidery conveniently resting on the table beside her. To give her fingers something to do, she proceeded to drag the needle and thread through the white fabric.

“Well?” Gabriel drawled. Striding over, he claimed the seat directly across from Philippa. And just one additional probing Edgerton stare pricked her already burning skin.

“I fell,” she said under her breath. At the protracted silence, she paused in her work and glanced up.

The trio of Edgertons stood, mouths agape.

“You mumbled,” Chloe said with the same shock of one who’d first discovered the world was, in fact, round.

Philippa shook her head. “No.” She didn’t mumble or mutter. Ever. She was always proper.

“Yes,” Gabriel said with a faint grin. “You did.”

“He is correct,” Chloe continued. “And you know, it pains me to ever admit Gabriel is correct about anything, but in this, he is.” She paused. “You mumbled.”

“I hardly think whether or not I mumbled merits a discussion,” she said between tight lips as she dragged the needle through the frame once more. Then, what she had thought, wished, or wanted, had never truly mattered. She jabbed the tip of the needle into her thumb. She gasped, as the frame tumbled onto her lap…and was met, once more, with that damning, telling silence. Philippa stuffed her wounded digit into her mouth.

Her mother clasped her hands at her throat. “Did you…stick your finger?”

Given that she even now sucked on that same finger, Philippa opted not to respond.

“You never make a mistake,” Chloe matter-of-factly observed.

How very wrong her sister was. She had made the very worst mistakes in her life; ones that moved beyond a silly scrap of linen with flowers embroidered upon it. She curled her toes into the arch of her feet and winced as pain shot up her injured ankle.

“I believe we were speaking about the Marquess of Guilford?” her mother encouraged, because, inevitably, all matters came ’round to unwed gentlemen.

“Were we?” she asked, picking up her small wooden frame, once again. He could be very happily married, or more, unhappily married, as she’d been for six miserable years. After all, what did she know about the gentleman? Except, would a gentleman who’d bothered to collect flowers with her daughter and took time to search for said child’s mother be one of those nasty sorts that Lord Winston had been?