To Woo a Widow (The Heart of a Duke #10)(15)

“And what of you?” He arched an eyebrow.

“Me?” She touched a hand to her chest. “I have never been proficient at riding,” she admitted. Or conversing. Or being anything other than proper. Dull, proper, always-pious Philippa. She curled her hands into tight balls, never hating that truth of her character more than she did in this moment. She sighed. “I’m proficient at this,” she said, lifting the embroidery frame once more. In a show her mother would have lamented, Philippa tossed her frame to the marquess who easily caught it in his large, gloved hand. “And so everyone, of course, assumes I must enjoy it. Why shouldn’t I? I know how to draw the thread just so and how to craft an image upon it. Where is the pleasure in it, though?” she asked, the words just spilling out when they never, ever did.

“What, then?” At his quietly spoken question, she tipped her head. “What do you find pleasure in?”

“My daughters,” she said with an automaticity borne of truth. In their world, ladies didn’t speak about affection or emotion they carried for their children. And yet… “My daughters make me happy.” She coughed into her hand.

He searched his piercing gaze over her face. “I expect they would,” he said with a matter-of-factness that caused her heart to pull. There was a sincerity to those words, at odds with everything her own father and late husband had proven in terms of affection for children. “What else?”

She started. “What else?” What else made her happy? No one in the course of her life, not even her sister whom she adored, had ever put that query to her. As such, it was a question she’d not really given any thought to. Her existence was a purposeful one where she’d been a countess, in charge of a household staff, and her daughters’ tutors and nursemaids. But she’d not always been that way. “I used to read fairytales,” she said wistfully. Not unlike the books she read to her daughters. She’d forgotten until he’d forced her to think back to how those fanciful tales had once brought her happiness, as well. “My mother abhorred my reading selection. Called it drivel,” she said with a remembered laugh. Philippa hadn’t cared. She’d been so enthralled by the possibility of forever happiness promised on those pages that she’d braved her mother’s displeasure. It was why she even now read to her girls from those same books.

“Is that why you stopped reading them?”

She blinked as Miles’ quietly spoken question jerked her back to the present—and the impropriety of speaking so familiarly with a man she’d only just met. She firmed her lips into a line, willing herself to say nothing. Still, there was this inexplicable ease being around him, when she’d never even been comfortable around her own family. Philippa lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug. “One day,” she’d been married just a fortnight, “I remember finishing a book and just realizing…” She let her words trail off.

“Realizing?” he urged, a sea of questions in his fathomless eyes.

“How very silly it was to believe in a land of happily-ever-afters.” Such dreams didn’t exist. Life in the Edgerton household had proven as much. Marriage to Lord Winston had only confirmed it. No, dreams of fairytales were reserved for innocent children unscathed by life. Or that is what she’d come to believe. Now, this man before her swooped into her life and stirred all those oldest yearnings she’d once carried. Feeling Miles’ gaze on her, Philippa’s face heated. She’d said entirely too much. Words she’d never even acknowledged to herself and suddenly it was too much. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said softly. “I must go see my daughters.”

“Of course,” he said politely and climbed to his feet.

And as he took his leave, the tension drained from her body, down to her feet. She’d long believed there was nothing more perilous than Lord Winston and his dogged attempt to get a male babe on her.

Now she feared she’d been wrong.

The gentle, tender Miles Brookfield’s ability to stir her long buried dream of a happily-ever-after was far more dangerous.





Chapter 7


Philippa had never been someone who listened at keyholes. Where Chloe had slunk about the townhouse with her ear pressed to oaken panels, she had wisely continued on. Not because she’d not been remotely curious about what was discussed behind those thick doors, but rather, the terror at what would become of her if she was discovered at those keyholes. It had been an attempt at self-preservation.

Now, years later, she saw it as a testament to her weakness and failings. That self-awareness, however, was not what brought her to a stop outside her elder brother’s office, the following morning. Philippa slowed her steps.

“…She is far too young to remain a widow, Gabriel…” At the insistence in her mother’s tone, Philippa’s stomach knotted.

“…She is in possession of her dowry, Mother… She does not need…” Whatever she did or did not need and their mother’s response to it was lost to the thick wood. Philippa gave her head a befuddled shake. This was Gabriel? This man who spoke of her remaining unmarried, was so at odds with the practical, determined, matchmaking brother who’d introduced her to her late husband. “You cannot expect her to make a match with just any gentleman…” Gabriel continued, “…She loved him…”