She Was Invited to Tea, Never Imagining It Was a Blind Date With the Duke—Until She Found Three Cups on the Table, His Mother Missing, and the Most Eligible Man in England Waiting for Her Alone

PART 10

The wedding took place in early autumn. It was elegant without being enormous, largely because Evelyn refused to permit three hundred people she did not know to witness what she considered a private promise.

Constance objected to the guest list for approximately eleven minutes, and then surrendered with dignity.

Jonathan walked his daughter down the aisle. At the church door he looked at Theodore — no joke this time, no warning — and simply placed Evelyn’s hand into his.

Theodore understood exactly what had been entrusted to him in that gesture.

Marianne cried before the ceremony, during the ceremony, and afterwards, while insisting that she had not cried at all.

Lady Arabella did not attend. She sent a short note.

I wish you both happiness.

Evelyn read it twice, then folded it and put it away. That was enough.

Marriage did not transform Evelyn into a flawless duchess.

At her first formal dinner at Alderwick she addressed a viscount by the wrong title. Theodore whispered the correction. She stepped on his foot. He considered the matter settled.

She disagreed with the housekeeper about the east drawing room, discovered that managing a great household required more diplomacy than many a parliamentary debate, and once escaped a reception through a side door, having reached the absolute limit of her capacity to discuss the weather.

Theodore found her in the library.

“You disappeared.”

“I walked twenty feet.”

He laughed.

They argued, sometimes. Evelyn occasionally mistook independence for a refusal of help. Theodore occasionally made decisions too quickly. But now they recognized the shape of it when it came. He learned to ask. She learned that accepting assistance did not make her beholden to anyone.

Their marriage became neither the grand romance that society imagined nor the perfect union that Constance occasionally pretended to have engineered.

It became something better. A real one.

Several months after the wedding, on a cold winter afternoon, Evelyn and Theodore arrived together at Langford House.

Constance had invited them to tea. Nothing more, or so she claimed.

Evelyn entered the drawing room first, and stopped.

Theodore nearly walked into her.

“What is it?”

She pointed.

The tea table was prepared. Three cups.

Theodore looked at the cups. Then at Evelyn. Then both of them looked toward his mother.

Constance stood beside the fireplace with an expression of complete innocence.

“What?”

“Who else is coming?” Theodore asked.

“No one.”

Evelyn removed her gloves slowly. “Are you certain?”

Constance looked offended. “I have invited my son and daughter-in-law to tea.”

Theodore glanced toward the curtains. Evelyn did the same.

Constance followed their gaze. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

He crossed the room and inspected behind one curtain.

“Theodore.”

“No unmarried gentlemen.”

Evelyn checked the other. “Nor ladies.”

Constance pressed a hand to her chest. “One small conspiracy.”

“Small?”

“One successful conspiracy,” she amended. “And my reputation is destroyed forever.”

Evelyn sat. Theodore took the chair beside her. Constance poured the tea with wounded dignity.

Three cups. The same pale porcelain. The same room. Almost the same table.

Yet nothing was the same.

Evelyn remembered the woman who had walked into that room months earlier expecting an ordinary afternoon, and found a duke instead. She remembered his bewildered expression. The third chair. The tea going cold. The laugh that had surprised them both.

She looked at the man beside her. Theodore felt her gaze and turned.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That expression never means nothing.”

“I was remembering.”

He looked toward the third cup. “So was I.”

Constance pretended not to be listening.

After a moment Evelyn reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

“Thank you.”

Constance looked at her. “For the tea.”

Evelyn smiled. “For not attending the first one.”

Constance’s expression changed. The humour in it softened into something quieter.

Across the table, Theodore shook his head. “I knew that eventually you would encourage her.”

“I am merely acknowledging historical fact.”

“You realize she will become impossible now.”

Constance lifted her chin. “I was already impossible. You simply failed to appreciate the consistency of my character.”

Evelyn laughed.

And beneath the tablecloth, Theodore’s hand found hers.

No one else could see it. His fingers threaded through hers and stayed there.

Such a small thing.

Months earlier, Evelyn had believed that the most remarkable part of loving Theodore would be the title, the great house, the carriages, the balls, the extraordinary transformation of becoming a duchess.

She had been wrong.

It was this. A hand finding hers beneath a table. The familiar sound of his laugh in another room. Knowing when his silence meant thought rather than displeasure. Being able to disagree with him and remain loved afterwards. Being able to accept his kindness without surrendering herself to it — and knowing that the man beside her no longer believed that love meant preparing a life for someone and inviting her to step into it.

They were building one together.

Constance looked from her son to Evelyn — two people who had arrived at that table, once, expecting nothing more than tea. She smiled.

Perhaps matchmaking was a terrible habit. Perhaps she should never do it again.

Then she remembered an unmarried nephew.

Theodore saw the expression cross his mother’s face. “No.”

Constance blinked. “I have said nothing.”

“You were thinking.”

“I am permitted thoughts.”

“Not those thoughts.”

“You cannot possibly know what I was thinking.”

“I have known you for thirty-five years.”

“That has clearly made you presumptuous.”

Evelyn looked between them. “What was she thinking?”

“Nothing,” said Constance.

“My cousin,” said Theodore, at exactly the same moment.

Constance glared at him.

Evelyn began to laugh. “You have another unmarried man.”

“That is entirely beside the point.”

“Mother, I merely observed that your cousin has been rather lonely lately.”

“No, I have not proposed anything.”

“You are never allowed to prepare three cups again.”

“This is my house.”

“Two cups.”

“Four, perhaps.”

“Mother.”

Constance looked at Evelyn. “Do you see what marriage has done to him?”

Evelyn squeezed Theodore’s hand beneath the tablecloth.

“I’m afraid he was already like this.”

THE END.