“He’s here! The Duke of Redcliff! He’s here!”
“Well, I’m glad you’re excited now that it’s notyourmarriage we’re discussing,” Phoebe muttered, though she did make sure that she didn’t say it loudly enough for her sister to hear. She didn’t want to make Hannah feel guilty, not really. Hannah hadn’t forced Phoebe to offer anything, or at least, she hadn’t done so intentionally.
Phoebe was just… tired.
But she did her duty, which felt like the only thing she had been doing of late. She didn’t have a good attitude about it, not necessarily, but she felt it was rather beyond the pale to ask her to help everyone outandhave a good attitude about it.
So, she met the Duke with a scowl.
“Good to see you as ever, Miss Turner,” he said archly.
Phoebe could have tried to say something polite, but her father was there, so there wasn’t any point—nor any chance.
“Phoebe is of course glad to see you, too, Your Grace,” Lord Turner hastened to reassure the Duke. “Very glad. It’s just that young ladies can be so very emotional about matters of matrimony. You mustn’t hold it against her. It’s just a weakness of her sex.”
The Duke turned and looked at Lord Turner. He didn’t say a word. He just looked.
Phoebe found that suddenly, shecouldface this adventure with a smile. It was simply too amusing to watch her father practically collapse in on himself under the force of that stare.
When Lord Turner was little more than a smudge on the marble floor of the entrance hall to the house, the Duke finally spoke.
“Right,” he said. “I would like to speak with Miss Turner. Alone.”
“Um,” her father objected quietly, “I’m not sure that that is, I mean, entirely proper?”
Phoebe applauded him for making it through that sentence, even if the words did get quieter and smaller as they went on.
The next look from the Duke was much shorter, but only because Lord Turner gave in.
“Yes, of course, as you say, Your Grace.”
Phoebe was not entirely unsympathetic to her father, even with his manifold faults.
“We’ll go out to the garden, Father,” she suggested, undertaking a heroic effort to avoid laughter. “It will be perfectly respectable.”
Now, the Duke glared at her.
“It’s snowing,” he told her acidly.
“Keen observation, Your Grace,” she said brightly. If he thought his grouchy glare was going to have an effect on her, he was destined for disappointment. She’d had a lifetime of surviving angry looks growing up under her father’s roof.
He frowned.
She beamed.
Lord Turner looked like he wished himself anywhere else.
“Fine,” the Duke snapped after a long moment. “But for God’s sake, get your cloak this time at least.”
“You’re sosweetto me,” she simpered. But she did get her cloak and a thick, woolen scarf, which she wrapped three times around her neck until she was covered practically up to her nose.
“Happy now?” she asked him.
Her father had been so thoroughly quashed that he didn’t even object to this display of pertness.
“Ecstatic,” the Duke said dryly. “The garden, then.”
The weather outside was almost idyllic. Snowflakes fluttered to the ground, where they lingered for only a moment before melting against the pebbled path. London snow was a very different creature from countryside snow, and the frigid wind that blasted through the calm every few minutes seemed determined to make that clear to anyone who dared poke so much as a toe outside.
