The housekeeper hesitated only very slightly before inclining her head. “Of course.”
Rowan rose. If he stayed any longer, the empty seat where Aaron should have been would only keep accusing him.
“The Earl of Weston and his daughter, Lady Emmeline Greene.”
The footman’s voice carried clearly over the music as Emmeline entered the ballroom on her father’s arm. Heads turned in every direction, voices dipped, and glances lifted one by one until the whole room seemed aware of her at once.
Emmeline had known they would look. She had prepared for it. Yet the force of it still made something tighten beneath her ribs, because these were not ordinary looks of admiration or passing curiosity. These were sharpened by scandal. She could feel their hungry attention devour her.
“Do not let them unsettle you,” her father murmured.
She turned her head only slightly. “I shall do my best.”
The ballroom blazed with warmth, music, jewels, and movement, and for one disorienting moment, she felt far too visible and far too exposed, as if her dress was transparent.
She kept her chin level and her expression composed, though her pulse beat too fast at the base of her throat and her skin prickled with the effort of holding herself together beneath so many watchful eyes.
Then, before the moment could close around her entirely, Margaret appeared.
“Thank God,” she said, sweeping toward Emmeline with bright, deliberate energy, her father just behind her. “I had begun to think you meant to leave me alone among these dreadful people.”
The weight lifted so fast from her shoulders that Emmeline nearly laughed.
“Never,” she said.
Margaret kissed her cheek lightly and then turned with easy warmth to Lord Weston, who greeted Viscount Dunbrook with sincere gratitude poorly disguised as ordinary courtesy. They fell into conversation at once, speaking just loudly enough, thatanyone watching would be forced to see that Emmeline would not be exiled.
Margaret slipped her arm through Emmeline’s. “There,” she murmured, smiling too naturally. “If they insist on staring, let them at least stare at something graceful.”
“You make it sound a performance.”
“It is a performance,” Margaret replied under her breath. “Society is merely a badly written play with expensive costumes.”
That did make Emmeline smile, if only for a moment.
Then the crowd shifted.
She did not see him at first. She felt the ballroom making room for someone without anyone appearing to move. When she turned, the Duke of Ironford was entering with the hosts on his arm’s breadth.
His suit was black enough to make the white of his linen and the severity of his broad frame seem sharper. There was no visible uncertainty in him, no hesitation, no mark of strain save for a faint tension around the eyes, as though the last days had cost him sleep.
The thought sent a foolish warmth through her that she immediately resented.
He approached them and greeted her father, then her.
“Lady Emmeline.” His voice was too deep, sitting somewhere low in her body before her mind had time to answer it.
“Your Grace.”
He did not linger over the pleasantries. Instead, with the eyes of half the room already moving between them, he drew a velvet box from the inner pocket of his coat and opened it, as his eyes fixed hers.
A diamond lay against the dark velvet, clear and bright and impossible to mistake for anything but a public declaration.
Emmeline heard the shift around them at once, those rippling whispers, the whole ballroom holding its breath at once.
The Duke looked at her.
“If I may,” he said.
