Chapter 1
London, England
Winter, 1821
After a miserable marriage to a man whose deception had left her children illegitimate, Martha Whitworth had despaired of knowing any true happiness for her and her three children.
Life, however, had proven there was happiness to be had for widowed women with fractured families.
Nay, life had not taught her as much… rather, her husband, Lord Graham Whitworth, had shown her that love was real and that she was deserving of it.
Her family, once divided, had been brought together by him. He’d married her. He’d given her and her children, at last, a name—an honorable one.
And much like the romantic tales she’d read as a girl, Martha might have said that hers was the happily-ever-after that young women dreamed of and most never attained.
For, everything was perfect.
Almost.
Hovering outside her husband’s office, Martha lingered in the hall… uncertain in ways she’d not been with Graham since their first meeting. But that had been before, back when he was a stranger. Back when she was still jaded and hadn’t trusted his motives for coming to her village.
And yet… in the middle of the boisterous din of the laughter and discourse between her children at the dining table, a note had arrived. Graham had read it. Pocketed it. And though he’d smiled and laughed in all the right places, attending whichever questions her daughters, Iris and Creda, had put to him, or taken part in whatever stable talk her son had for him, he’d been… different.
There had been a remoteness to his enthralling smile.
She brushed her fingertips over the brass door handle and then drew her hand back. Martha lifted her knuckles to knock.
“What are you doing?” she mouthed into the quiet. The long-familiar habit of speaking to herself had started after her late husband’s death and her daughters’ departure, still too recent to be vanquished. “This is Graham.” Before she faltered once more, Martha gripped the handle and let herself in.
“I was wondering if you were going to enter,” her husband said with his devilishly wicked half grin. Tossing his pen down, Graham unfurled all six feet, three inches of his towering, wiry frame.
Closing the door, Martha pressed her back against the oak panel. “Mr. Whitworth,” she greeted, testing the name that was now her own and, after just two days of marriage, so very foreign still.
His grin deepened, meeting his eyes and making her heart flutter. “Mrs. Whitworth,” he murmured, taking long, languid steps forward.
Let that be enough… Do not borrow trouble and concern where there is none.
And yet… she knew this man. As such, when Graham stopped several steps away, the earlier distance between them now erased, Martha identified the absence of the slightest dimple in his right cheek.
Fighting back the unease needling around her lower belly, she forced a smile of her own.
They spoke at the same time.
“Is everything—?”
“Are the children—?”
Martha and Graham both ceased talking. Bowing his head, Graham motioned for her to continue.
“The children are… fine.” Though the girls they’d retrieved from Mrs. Munroe’s Finishing School had become miniature versions of adults in the nearly two years Martha had been away from them. Strangers she barely recognized.
Of a sudden, she wanted to cry.
“What is it?” he murmured, cupping her cheek, and she leaned into that touch, strong, and yet, tender at the same time. “Are they… not happy?” he asked, and there was a hesitancy there from this man who’d only ever been more confident than God himself.
“No, they are happy. Very much so,” she rushed to assure. As confident and fearless as Graham had proven to be, Martha appreciated how foreign it was for him to go from being a bachelor to being a stepfather with three children—two of whom had been strangers until just yesterday. “They are… excited to be here.”
Some of the tension eased from his frame, and capturing her hand, Graham lifted it to his fingers. “I am glad,” he said, pressing his lips to her knuckles.
A delicious shiver radiated from the lingering caress. Some of her fears melted away as he continued those sensual ministrations, caressing his lips along the inside of her wrist. “So there is… another reason you’ve come,” he whispered between kisses, his breath tickling and tempting at the same time.
A breathless laugh escaped her. “You are distracting m-me, Graham.”
“Distractions are good,” he murmured, and his lips teased at the corner of her mouth.
Martha’s head tipped back, rattling the door panel. “Th-they are,” she agreed as his lips covered hers. The heat of the kiss brought her eyes closed, and she climbed her hands about his neck, turning herself over to his embrace. Meeting each slant of his mouth. Allowing herself to feel. Letting herself forget that there’d been a reason he’d shut himself away from his offices, while she’d gone on to bed.
Reality intruded, cold, unwelcome, and the thief of joy it always was.
Reluctantly, Martha sank back on her heels.
Graham moved his attentions to her neck.
“Behave,” she chided, giving his forearm a little pinch. “This isn’t why I’ve c-come.”
“You’re certain?” he asked, lightly suckling the skin where her pulse pounded.
“Q-quite.” Her voice was breathless and unconvincing to her own ears.
With a sigh, her husband straightened. “Very well, madam.” He swept his arm out in invitation toward the broad, mahogany Chippendale desk. Ledgers and books lay open, along with several notes, on the usually immaculate surface.
Martha swept forward, taking the chair closest to his desk, closest to those documents.
“You are busy,” she noted needlessly.
An agent for a secret division of the Crown, called the Brethren, her husband would always be… busy.
“Never too busy for you, love,” he vowed. His silken baritone contained a promise within it that sent heat stealing to her heart.
That devotion should be enough. Mayhap it was selfishness. Nay… it was not that. Her coming here to speak with Graham was because the realization that she’d finally come to—with the help of this man before her—was that she was deserving of happiness. And so was he.
“You’re…” She started to speak when her gaze snagged on a note on his desk.
My dearest son…
Martha’s stomach muscles contracted as Graham deftly folded that missive and slid it under his diary.
His family. That was what this… detachment… was about. “You’re not yourself, Graham,” she said quietly. Holding his stare, she dared him with her eyes to speak the truth. Demanded that he not require her to put questions to him, pulling forth the reason for his distractedness since dinner.
He scrubbed a hand down his sharp jawline, dark from a day’s growth of beard. “My family… My mother wrote me.”
There it was. He’d given her the truth when he could have prevaricated or sidestepped with false assurances. Her heart swelled with her love for this man. Perfect. Pure. And yet, that love was offset by his revelation. “Did she?” Martha managed the question in even tones.
Wordlessly, he slipped the note from its hiding place and came around the desk to sit beside her.
He held out the hated missive.
Martha stared between the note and Graham, before taking it with reluctant fingers, not wanting to know the words there, but at the same time needing to know. She unfolded the page, noting the officious gold wax seal. Even broken it revealed the stamp of power. And then she read the neat, elegant scrawl.
My dearest son…
I’m never too proud to recognize and admit my own flaws and mistakes, Sheldon. I’m a flawed being… and I can acknowledge openly to you, that I was wrong…
Her hands convulsed reflexively upon the page, crinkling it at the corners, and she forced herself to loosen her grip as she stared transfixed at those several lines. Ones she’d have wagered her very life that a duchess could never, and would never, cede to anyone.
And they painted Graham’s mother… in an altogether different light. It had been far easier to resent his family when they’d been the ones who’d interfered and sought to keep Martha and Graham apart.
This, however? This very real woman who admitted that she’d made a mistake? And about Graham’s relationship with Martha, no less? It didn’t fit with what she’d come to believe or expect of his ducal parents.
She continued reading and then stumbled over the next paragraph.
It is my greatest hope that you and your family will join us this holiday season.
Oh, blast and damn. Her husband’s family, the Duke and Duchess of Sutton, were inviting them to visit.
In the time Graham had known his wife, he’d come to appreciate that silence was not something Martha shied away from.
Where previous women of his acquaintance had prattled and trilled misplaced laughter before ever surrendering to any silence, Martha always comfortably owned it.
Being both pensive and measured had become two of the many qualities he appreciated and admired in his wife.
This stretch of quiet, however, was different, because he knew where this quiet came from—his family’s treatment of her.
The familiar rage that had consumed him when he’d discovered his father had sent round his loyal man-of-affairs to pay off Martha had since receded, to be replaced with… a deep, aching hurt that nagged.
He’d expected such interference from his father. The Duke of Sutton had never had a high opinion of Graham and had little faith in his judgment. His brother hadn’t given a jot what he did with his life. But Graham’s mother? He’d expected more from her.
Martha finished reading before folding the note along the crease and turning it back over.
“We’re not going,” he said when his wife made no attempt to speak.
There was the slightest, most infinitesimal stiffening of her slender frame that, had he not been seated a pace away, he would have missed. “Beg pardon?”
“I’ve no intention of us journeying to visit,” he repeated. Coming to his feet, he tossed the missive atop his notes from the Brethren.
“Not for the holidays?” she put forward hesitantly.
Not ever, if he had his way. “No.” He perched his hip on the edge of his desk.
Except, there was no tangible hint of her joy at that announcement. “Your family wishes to see you, Graham.”
“Correction. My mother wishes to see me.” And by the contents of the note, she also wished to meet Martha and see Frederick again. Ever the peacemaker in the fractured Whitworth family, she’d not be content until Graham and his family were reunited. Alas, too much injury had been done. An affront against himself he could forgive—he’d been recipient enough through the years. An affront against Martha and her children he could not. “I have altogether different plans for us, love.” Plans that did not include placing her before the ducal father who’d rip apart her worth.
“What manner of plans?”
Graham shoved lazily to his feet and strolled before her. “Curious, are you?”
A smile teased at her lips. “You don’t have plans. You’re inventing them as reasons why you can’t, or won’t, travel to your family for the holidays.”
He slammed a hand to his chest, and in a mock display of outrage, Graham stumbled to his knees. “You’ve wounded me, love.”
Martha laughed, those rich, husky tones wrapping around him, enveloping him in a warmth that had him joining her in laughter. “Very well, then,” she said with a flick of her hand. “Let us hear of these grand plans preventing you from traveling.”
“The grand plans I have that prevent us from traveling…” he murmured, leaning forward to take her lips in a too brief kiss. “Return to Hyde Park with you and Frederick, and this time bring your daughters, to skate together.” The one and only time they’d journeyed to Hyde Park, that place his artist wife had longed to sketch, had been with Frederick… and—his throat moved—he’d not allow himself to think of how close he’d come to losing her that afternoon, just days ago.
Martha’s lips parted on a breathless sigh. “Oh.”
“Shall I continue?”
“Please.”
“Then, I thought we should honor that peculiar, but fascinating tradition Frederick shared with me.”
“The tree-cutting and decorating?”
He winked. “The very one. Fascinating stuff, and it all sounds like a very good time.”
His wife rested her palms against his chest, and she smoothed her callused digits, stained with charcoal, along the front of his lapels. “It all sounds… perfect.”
Graham leaned up to kiss her again, but she drew away. “But we’ll have a lifetime to do those things as a family.”
God, she was tenacious. She’d been so from their first meeting at the White Stag Inn. “And there will be a lifetime of miserable winter house parties.”
His wife folded her hands on her lap and tipped her chin up at a defiant angle. “You need to go, Graham.”
His brows came together.
“We need to g-go,” she substituted, that slight telling tremble indicating she’d even less of a desire to visit his family—as she should.
“We do not need to do anything.” And he’d certainly not do anything or take his new family any place where they’d be uncomfortable or treated poorly.
Her chin came up another notch. “Are you ashamed of us?”
He reeled. “That is what you believe?” Despite his training with the Home Office and the work he did, he was unable to mask his hurt. “You could think so ill of me?” Restless, Graham quit his place at her feet and strode over to the windows. Outside, snow had begun to fall, tiny flakes floating down to the quiet streets below. How could she doubt his love for her?
The leather groaned, and the floorboards creaked as she moved just beyond his shoulder. “No,” she said quietly. “I-I…” Graham glanced over his shoulder. Martha sighed. “Very well… I… This is all still new.”
“Us?” he supplied.
A sound of frustration escaped her. “This happiness, and I don’t want it to end.”
Graham caught her lightly by the shoulders. Drawing her close, he rested his forehead against hers. “This,” he whispered, “will never end, Martha. Our life together—mine and yours, and Creda and Iris and Frederick—it is only beginning. Your happiness… you and your children… our children, that is what matters most to me. And so a summons from my family, after they tried to separate us? They don’t merit a response or a visit.”
Tears glazed her eyes, and he caught the first errant drop to fall with the pad of his thumb, stroking it away. “You’d sacrifice seeing your family for me?”
“In a heartbeat.” Gathering her tightly balled fists, he brought them to his mouth and kissed them slowly. “There is no sacrifice in being with you and rejecting those who’d hurt you.”
Martha stepped out of his arms. “But this isn’t your mother and father hurting or rejecting me. This is them attempting to bring you back into their fold.”
“This is my mother’s usual effort following any row I’ve had with my father,” he said dryly. Martha was making more of the missive than there was. “She doesn’t appreciate any discord.”
“You’re wrong, Graham,” she said with her usual confidence. Martha rushed over to his desk. The hint of lavender that clung to her skin wafted past, filling his senses. She brandished the duchess’ note. “This is not a letter from a duchess. This is a letter from your mother.”
He puzzled his brow. “Aren’t they quite the same?”
“They are not at all the same. This is not a formal summons. This is simply her asking you to come home.”
“I am home,” he said automatically. “Where you are is home.”
The heart-shaped planes of Martha’s face melted. “Oh, Graham,” she breathed, and walking over, Martha went up on tiptoes and kissed him once more.
Their mouths met in another tender meeting that ended too quickly.
Martha stepped away. “I love you, and I’m grateful that you’d make that sacrifice for me.”
“It is no sacr—”
“But I’ll not be the one that holds you… or us back from visiting your family.” With that, she pressed the note into his fingers and swept off.
“Where are you going?” he called after her.
Martha continued on without so much as a glance back. “To see our belongings packed. We leave on the morn.” She drew the door shut behind her.
Graham reread the already familiar lines in his mother’s hand, seeing the words as Martha had indicated they’d been written.
This is them attempting to bring you back into their fold.
It had been settled. He and Martha would return to Graham’s family’s home and face the beasts of Polite Society who’d come for his parents’ latest house party—whether he wished it or not.