Chapter 2
The prospect of meeting a duke would be daunting for any woman. It was even more so for a woman who’d gone and married a duke’s son… after that same duke had attempted to pay her to leave his son alone.
As such, when they were forced to stop at a quiet inn because of snow, Martha could only feel secretly relieved that their journey to Graham’s family was delayed.
“The sun is out!” Frederick piped in happily.
Or their journey had been delayed.
Martha’s stomach muscles twisted in knots, vicious, unrelenting knots that made it impossible to break her fast at their corner table of the Fox and Hare Inn. Martha spared the dubious contents of her plate a glance. Though, in fairness, even if she hadn’t sat there dreading her impending meeting with her in-laws and their host of societal guests, the ivory-colored slop atop what might or might not be charred potatoes was enough to give any person pause. Sighing, she set down her fork and abandoned all pretense of eating.
“I preferred the snow,” her eldest twin daughter, Creda, was saying, long contrary to both her siblings. She spoke around an alarmingly large bite of the suspect morning meal.
Iris snorted.
Creda swallowed another spoonful down and then dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “What? I dooooo,” she said for her younger-by-eight-minutes sister. “It’s ever more interesting than the sun,” she groused, leaning down and rubbing at her shin.
“I prefer the sun, too.” Frederick glanced back and forth from between his bickering sisters. His smile stretched from ear to ear in a way it hadn’t since his sisters had been sent away and he and Martha had remained on alone. “But I also like the snow.” Nay, he’d smiled again. But it hadn’t been because of Martha. It had been because of Graham. The man who’d slipped into her life, pretending to be a stable master, and stolen her heart, and given her and her children his name in the process.
Creda beamed. “See?” She preened. “There’s nothing wrong with loving the snow.”
“Graham enjoys it, too,” Frederick chattered, excitement dripping from the words as they tumbled from his lips.
Iris rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say there was anything wrooong with liking snow, just that we should be respectful that as long as it is snowing, Lord Whitworth will not be able to continue on to visit his family for the holidays.”
“Just Graham,” Frederick put forward. “He’s married to Mother, and therefore, Graham will do.”
“You’re just excited about meeting a duke,” Creda shot at her sister.
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
Frederick looked helplessly at Martha.
“That will be all,” she said quietly, and apparently, despite the time apart, that cease-bickering-immediately-tone still had power behind it. Martha, who’d never allowed bickering to go on and always ended it with a hug, was, however, finding her way again.
Her three children looked to her. The girls were near-identical images of each other, their brother dark-haired while they were light.
Pushing aside her untouched plate, Martha drew in a slow breath. “I know… this… is unusual to each of you.”
They stared back in silence, revealing nothing about what they were thinking in their usually expressive features.
“Creda and Iris, you’ve been… a-away.” Emotion garbled the words, making a mess of them. Learning her husband had been married to another and her father responsible for coordinating the murder of the man who’d deceived her, Martha’s entire family had been shattered. Of all she’d lost, these two more mature versions of the little girls she’d sent off to finishing school had been the greatest. “And so… this…” Martha made herself speak again and motioned around the table. “Behaving with one another, or acting with one another…”
Creda cocked her head. “What are you saying?” God love her eldest twin. She’d always been direct when Martha had herself only just discovered that skill.
“She’s saying it’s awkward to be around one another,” Iris said flatly.
For the first time since Martha had shared with her son Graham’s offer to marry her, the perpetual smile Frederick wore slipped. “It’s not awkward.” Anger flashed in his eyes. “We’re family. We always are and always will be… Now, we have Graham, too.”
They looked as one to the window where Graham stood outside, speaking to the drivers of the two carriages. All the while, the pair of footmen who’d accompanied them arranged the trunks atop the conveyances. He was saying something. Periodically, the drivers would nod.
Whatever Graham said just then earned laughter from both men.
As if he felt their collective stares, Graham looked over.
Martha’s heart did a little somersault in her chest.
Graham smiled, a lazy half grin that had captivated her from the moment he’d turned it on her, before then shifting his attention to her daughters. Doffing his beaver-fur-lined top hat, he bowed his head for Creda and Iris.
Both girls giggled, and it was the first time the contrary twins had shown a like response to anyone or anything, ever.
Yes, Graham had that effect on… any woman of any age. He could charm a lady out of her good name if he so sought. And even with that magnetizing pull, he still was and had only ever been honorable. To her, when the world had called her “whore” and “bigamist” and her son a “bastard”… he’d defended them at every slight.
“I like him,” Creda said when Graham had gone back to coordinating the details of their departure.
Iris pointed her eyes skyward. “You don’t even know him.”
Frederick surged to the edge of his seat, but Creda was already ticking off her defense on her fingers. “He answered four nonstop hours of questions from Frederick on how to care for horses in the snow—”
“Hey,” Frederick exclaimed.
With her spare hand, Creda ruffled his dark curls and continued her enumeration.
“He did not so much as twitch a facial muscle when you, Iris, said you wanted to become the first female doctor so you could cut open dead bodies.”
Martha buried a laugh in her hand. “Graham wouldn’t.” He was unflappable. That ease and calm didn’t come with the rank he’d just recently taken on as an agent for the Home Office.
Iris bristled. “Graham being unfazed merits more of a reaction than the prospect of cutting open dead bodies?”
“Only because we all know you couldn’t have changed that much since you were gone,” Frederick supplied for her. “You can’t even tolerate a worm in your hand.”
The girl’s cheeks went bright red. “There were fifty of them… in my bed.”
Frederick thumped the table, commanding the pair to silence. “Creda has not finished her defense of Graham.”
Martha’s eldest twin gave a toss of her head, reveling in that defense. “More important, it bears stating and repeating that Graham could have quite contentedly left us behind at Mrs. Munroe’s.”
“We wanted to be at Mrs. Munroe’s,” Iris pointed out.
That cut through the lightness the previous dialoguing had stirred in her chest. Martha frowned and sat upright. “What?” Her daughters had wanted to remain at Mrs. Munroe’s?
Her daughters continued speaking over her query. “But he said he wished to meet us and introduce us to his family,” Creda countered. “It doesn’t matter that we want to remain at Mrs. Munroe’s, but rather, that he wished to meet us. After all, most stepfathers are content without young children underfoot.”
“Says who?” Frederick shot back, bristling with his ten-year-old’s indignation.
Iris released a long sigh. “Everrrrybody knows it. But Lord… Graham was more interested in meeting us, and therefore, that speaks a good deal about him.” A mischievous sparkle lit her eyes. “Furthermore, Graham is fine with you underfoot, so he has to be incredibly patient.”
Frederick stuck his tongue out, and as the pair resumed their bickering, Martha’s focus lingered not on that endearing and observant enumeration provided by her daughter, but rather, one statement. “You want to remain at Mrs. Munroe’s?” she blurted.
That cut across the quarreling siblings. “Of course we do,” Creda said for the pair.
“I… see.” Martha clasped her fingers and stared at the interlocked digits. What did you expect? You drove your daughters away. Did you think they should want to live with you? Yes, it had been to protect them. And now she’d rushed headlong to Mrs. Munroe’s to retrieve them… with a new husband… and stepfather.
“You’re sad,” Iris said hesitantly.
“I’m not.” How did Martha manage that lie so easily? Since Graham had asked her to marry him and said he wanted to be a family with her three children, she’d been only happy. Until now.
Creda covered her hands with one of her own. “It is… not because of you, Mama,” she said gently, in the greatest of role reversals. “You do know that?”
No, she didn’t.
“Why should she know that?” Frederick snapped. “When you don’t even want to be with u-us.” And the façade of anger gave way to a trembling syllable that conveyed the depth of his like sadness. “Is it because of Graham?” The fire was back in his eyes. “Because if it is, it’s only because you don’t know him. He’s kind and wonderful, and he throws snowballs and—”
“You think that’s what this is about?” Creda creased her eyebrows. “That we don’t want to be with you, as a family?” Folding her arms at her chest, she passed an accusatory stare between her mother and brother. “That we don’t like Lord… Graham?”
Martha wet her lips. “You… do?”
“Of course we do,” Iris said with another of her usual eye rolls. “We’re not so selfish that we don’t want to see our own mother happy.”
“What manner of ill opinion do you have of us?” Creda muttered.
“We are very happy to be reunited for the holidays,” Iris went on, the eternal peace-keeper. “And come to know Graham.”
“He smiles quite a lot, and it’s hard not to like someone who smiles so much,” Creda chimed in.
“We just have come to enjoy our lessons and instructors at Mrs. Munroe’s.”
Martha sank back in her chair. “Indeed?”
These almost two years apart, she’d imagined her daughters morose, missing their cottage in High Town, forlorn. Only to find that, all this time, they’d been—
“You’re happy there?” Frederick asked the question for her, his incredulity her own.
Both girls nodded and spoke in unison.
“Quite so.”
“Abundantly so.”
The twin girls exchanged a look. There was another slight nod from Iris, who spoke on their behalf. “Now would be an apt time to ask that, after the holidays, we be permitted to return for the next semester.”
“We’re studying powerful women in England’s history,” Creda said excitedly. “Or we were… but we left and did not see the conclusion of the unit.”
This was what this was about? Her daughters wanted to remain on as students?
“I daresay Frederick and I have the great honor of spending company in three women to rival those late figures.”
Martha gasped, and she and her children swung their gazes to the tall figure towering over them.
Her heart did another quick leap, as it always did—as it always had—whenever her husband was near.
“Graham!” Frederick cried, jumping to his feet. He rushed headlong into Graham’s arms, and her husband immediately folded the boy in an easy paternal embrace that Martha’s own father, who’d loved her, had never managed. Nor the man who’d sired Frederick.
Dropping their chins atop their palms, the twin girls released matching sighs.
Over the top of Frederick’s tousled curls, Graham held Martha’s stare. “The carriage is readied.”
She forced a smile, the muscles of her face strained so tight her cheeks ached.
It was time.