“Goodnight, Your Grace,” she whispered.
“Goodnight.”
The tavern he and Frederick chose was not one the ton claimed in daylight. It was quieter, lower-ceilinged, less polished, with music somewhere in the back room and the smell of ale.
Rowan preferred such places. Or had once. Tonight, he found no real ease.
“You are silent,” Frederick said over the rim of his glass.
“You talk enough for both of us.”
“True.” Frederick settled back. “Though I note you were no more talkative during the second act.”
Rowan said nothing.
Frederick smiled into his drink. “That bad, was it?”
“It was a play.”
“Mm.” Frederick drained the rest and set the glass down. “Well, I must leave you. I have an appointment.”
Rowan looked at him.
“With Celeste,” Frederick added, as if that explained everything. “And unlike you, I mean to enjoy mine.”
“Then go.”
Frederick rose with a laugh. “Try not to spend the whole night pretending you are not haunted by your fiancée.”
When he was gone, Rowan remained where he was, finishing his drink more slowly than he intended. The room had grown louder around him, though perhaps it only felt so because he kept trying to quiet his thoughts.
A woman approached the table.
Not one of the painted ladies who drifted from man to man by calculation alone, but one he knew from years ago, a barmaid named Violet, with chestnut curls and a smile that had once required little persuasion from him.
“Well,” she said, resting a hand against the back of the empty chair opposite him. “If it isn’t His Grace remembering simpler pleasures.”
Rowan looked up.
Her smile deepened. “You could come upstairs, if you like.”
There was a time he would have done it. A time he would have followed the invitation without thought, grateful for the easy use of someone else’s body to silence his own.
Now, with the scent of theatre dust and Emmeline’s perfume still trapped somewhere in his mind, the idea felt wrong.
“No, thank you. Goodnight.”
He stood, left a coin on the table to settle the drink, and stepped out into the London night.
He did not want another woman’s bed. He wantedEmmeline.
Heavens, he was doomed.
Chapter Nine
“How do you feel now that the banns have been read a third time?” Margaret asked it casually over the rim of her teacup, but there was nothing light in the way her bright green eyes held Emmeline’s.
Outside, carriage wheels rolled past in a dull rhythm over the street, and the bell above the tea shop door rang now and then as customers came and went. Everything smelled of tea leaves, sugar, and warm bread, and yet none of it softened the fact that, in only a few days, she would be the Duke of Ironford’s wife.
