“She asked why I wish to marry. And why now.”
The girls now quite a distance away, and she and West were both public and private. As with everything in Georgiana’s life these days. The situation was by design, yes, but it did not mean she enjoyed it.
Although, if she were fully in private with Duncan West, there was no telling what might happen.
They walked a little farther in silence before he said, “And how did you answer?”
She turned to him, shocked. “You too?” He lifted a shoulder in an expression she was coming to recognize in him. “You know, you do that when you want someone to think that you aren’t interested in what they are about to say.”
“Perhaps I’m not interested. Perhaps I’m simply being polite.”
“Since when does politeness include prying, personal questions?” she asked. “Did you not receive the lesson I just delivered to my daughter?”
“Something about skull drinking.” She laughed, taken by surprise, and he smiled briefly, the expression there, then gone, leaving only a pool of warmth in her stomach as he added, “Well, as your daughter pointed out, I am a reporter.”
“You’re a newspaper magnate,” she corrected.
He smiled. “A reporter at heart.”
She couldn’t help her matching smile. “Ah. Desperate for a story.”
“Not for all stories. But for your story? Quite.”
The words dropped between them, and they both seemed surprised by them. She was taken aback. Did he really mean it? Did he really care about her story? Or was he simply in it for the information she promised? For the payment she always rendered when he did the Angel a favor?
And why did the answers matter so much?
He saved her from the questions swirling through her mind. “But today, I will settle for an answer to Caroline’s question.”
Why did she wish to marry.
She shook her head. “There are a dozen reasons why I should marry.”
“Should is not wish.”
“That’s semantics.”
“It is not at all. I should not have kissed you yesterday. But I very much wished to. There’s nothing at all the same about the two.”
She stopped, the words sending surprise and something richer through her. Desire. She met his gaze, registering the heat in his brown eyes. “You just . . .” She hesitated. “You cannot simply announce things like that. As though we are not here, in a public place. In Hyde Park. At the fashionable hour.”
“That must be the most idiotic description for four o’clock in the afternoon that ever there was,” he said, and the conversation had changed. As though he hadn’t just said the word kiss in full view of London’s aristocracy.
Perhaps she’d dreamed it.
“So, tell me, Georgiana.” Her name was a caress even as they walked, a yard between them, in a perfectly innocuous portrait. “Why do you wish to marry?”
The question was quiet and liquid, and made her want nothing more than to answer it, even as she knew it was none of his business. She started with the obvious. “You know already. I require a title.”
“For Caroline.”
“Yes. She needs the protection of a decent title. With your help, she’ll receive it, and with it, hopefully, a future.”
“And you expect Langley to be a decent father.”
The words came so easily, with such a lightness, that she almost didn’t notice the way they probed, searching for the answer to the question she’d been asked her whole adult life. “If she’s lucky, yes.”
He nodded, and they walked farther. “Fair enough. But that is all for Caroline. What of you?”
“Me?”
“The meat of it is right there in the question, Georgiana, why do you wish to marry?”
The wind blew once more, and it carried the scent of him to her—sandalwood and something else, something clean and entirely masculine. Later, she would tell herself that it was the scent that made her tell the truth. “Because I haven’t any other choice.”
The truth of the words shocked her, and she wished she could take them back. She wished she’d said something else, something bolder and more brazen. But she hadn’t. Instead, he’d asked his questions and stripped her bare. Exposed her vulnerabilities. Even as she was the most powerful man in Britain, one who ruled the night, here, in the day, she was still just a woman, with a woman’s rights. And a woman’s insignificant power.
By day, as a mother with a daughter, she needed help.
He didn’t know all of that, of course. He knew she was ruined, but not the extent to which she could be destroyed. And even as he heard the truth in her words, he did not fully understand them. He did not press the issue, however, instead asking, “And why now?”
He’d asked her the question before. The night they’d met on the balcony at the Worthington Ball. The night he’d met Georgiana. She hadn’t answered then. But now, she spoke without hesitation, her gaze finding Caroline ahead. “She needs more than I can give her.”