Page 41 of A Duchess to Reclaim

“He is cordial,” Miss Gerhardt answered. “Though when they return from their visits with you he questions them. And us.”

“And what do you report?” Amelia answered anxiously.

“Only of your lessons. Where they are with their education. The girls speak of what they learn. Nothing about you.”

Amelia forced herself to breathe.

“Good. That is good.”

“There…there is something else though,” Miss Chiron added apprehensively. “Your father has had guests.”

Amelia looked at her quizzically.

“Gentlemen guests,” Miss Chiron went on. “For the girls. He won’t tell us a thing, but we believe he is trying to arrange marriages.”

Amelia paled. Sarah still had at least three more years before the marriage mart, and Lydia several more.

“Are these guests…fathers of eligible gentlemen?” She asked. It wasn’t so uncommon for parents to arrange marriages, even at her sisters’ young ages.

Miss Chiron looked down.

“No, Your Grace. They’re not bachelors. Some quite on in age.”

Fear and disgust slithered through Amelia’s bloodstream, making her knees weak.

“Very well,” she whispered, trying to gather herself. “I shall see what I can do about that. Thank you, ladies, for looking over my sisters.”

“It is the least we can do,” Miss Gerhardt said softly. “They are such good girls.”

“And with the increased rate your husband has given us recently, we have the most prized positions in all of London now.”

Amelia glanced at them in surprise.

“My husband increased your salaries?” She asked. She hadn’t even been aware that Dominic knew that she’d hired the governesses.

“Just a week or so ago,” Miss Gerhardt answered. “Around the time he returned to London.”

Amelia thought on this for a moment, not sure how to feel about it.

“Thank you, ladies,” she said politely, giving them a dismissive nod. “For everything. I believe I shall spend time with my sisters now.”

The two governesses curtseyed, and left her to attend to Sarah and Lydia. They practiced piano for a time, then Sarah sang her a new song that Lydia had written her. The day passed with warmth and laughter, and though there was a heaviness in her heart the entire time, Amelia smiled lovingly and purely with her sisters.

Before she took her leave though and after Miss Chiron and Miss Gerhardt had taken them away for supper, Amelia decided to go upstairs to her old room. Standing in it, she looked around at the completely new arrangement. All of her old things had been cleaned out, even her bed. Not a stitch of her remained in what now appeared to be just another guest room.

She then walked downstairs, going once more into the parlor and then library. Her little crafts, the embroidered pieces that once graced small spaces in the rooms. They were all gone as well.

Suddenly feeling as if the vast space was closing in on her, Amelia hurried from the house, tears wavering in her eyes, and demanded the driver to take her home. She had to get her sisters away from her father, she decided then and there. Permanently. Or she feared they would be erased just as she had.

CHAPTERELEVEN

“Amelia seems to be doing much better,” Hugo stated.

Dominic lifted his eyes back toward his wife for the hundredth time that evening. They’d barely spoken since their conversation a week ago in his study. After discovering what her past had been like with Fraser, he’d given her a wide birth. They seemed to be slipping into an odd place when it came to touch, and though he’d never admit it, he didn’t know where he stood with Amelia.

At times she seemed to want him. And he’d certainly developed an attraction to her; but there was so much chaos between them, and he was too busy with work and fixing their reputation to wade through it all. The garden party they were at presently was one such things; a way to prove to thetonthat any unsavory rumors were unfounded.

“She does indeed,” Dominic lied.

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