BECOMING A DUCHESS

Chapter 1: Clyvedon

The carriage had been rolling for what felt like the better part of forever.

Daphne Basset - the Duchess of Hastings,

She reminded herself, still startled by the weight of it - sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap and watched the English countryside unspool beyond the window like a painting that could not quite decide what it wanted to be. Rolling green hills gave way to dense forest, which gave way to open moorland, which gave way to a long, winding road flanked by ancient oaks so tall their branches met overhead and turned the afternoon light into something cathedral-like and gold.

She had not expected it to be so beautiful.

She had not expected a great many things about the past two weeks.

Across from her, Simon sat with one long leg crossed over the other, a book open in his hands. He had been reading - or pretending to read, she suspected - for the last hour. She had noticed, with the quiet attentiveness she had developed for all things Simon Basset, that he had not turned a single page.

"Are you going to tell me anything about it?" she asked.

He looked up. Those dark eyes, still capable of undoing her at entirely inconvenient moments, met hers with a flicker of something she could not quite name. Amusement, perhaps. Or nerves, though she doubted he would ever admit to the latter.

"About what?"

"Clyvedon." She gestured vaguely at the window, at the road, at the general direction of their future.

"Your home. Our home." She paused on those last two words, feeling their strangeness and their rightness in equal measure. "You have said almost nothing about it."

Simon closed his book, though he kept one finger between the pages as though he might need to retreat back into it at any moment. "It is large," he said.

Daphne waited.

"Very large," he added, with the air of a man who felt he had been generous.

"Simon."

"There is a library." Something shifted in his expression then - something genuine, unguarded, the way he sometimes looked when he forgot to be careful around her. "A rather exceptional one. My mother's doing, mostly. She was - " He stopped. Started again. "She loved books."

Daphne stored that away carefully, the way she stored all the small, unintentional things he told her about himself. Like pressed flowers. Fragile and precious and not to be handled carelessly.

"And the grounds?" she asked, keeping her voice light.

"Extensive. There are gardens, though I confess they have been somewhat - " he searched for the word - "neglected. I have not spent a great deal of time at Clyvedon in recent years."

"How recent?"

A beat. "Seven years, give or take."

Daphne blinked. "Seven years?"

"I preferred London." He said it without apology but also, she thought, without complete ease. "And the continent. And anywhere, frankly, that was not - " He stopped himself again, and this time the door closed more firmly. "It simply was not somewhere I chose to spend time."

She studied him for a moment - the line of his jaw, the careful blankness he could pull over his face like a curtain when he felt he had said too much. She had already learned not to pull at the curtain when he drew it. Not yet, anyway. There was time. They had, somewhat astonishingly, the rest of their lives.

"Well," she said instead, turning back to the window, "I shall look forward to the library."

She heard, rather than saw, the small exhale of relief that he tried very hard to disguise as nothing at all.