“Or someone who guessed,” Colborne offered. “Lady Fairhart’s identity is protected, but speculation has circulated for years.”
“It would take someone motivated enough to try,” Hugo said. “That narrows the field.”
Lily listened to them strategize and felt something shift in her understanding of the man leaning against the fireplace. She had seen the Duke be charming, provocative, and infuriating. But this was different. This was the Duke of Thornwaite with the performance stripped away, his mind working through the problem with a focus and precision that reminded her, uncomfortably, that beneath the rakish exterior lived a man who ran estates, managed investments, and held a seat in the House of Lords.
He was not simply charming. He was capable. And the combination was more unsettling than either quality alone.
“I will monitor every print shop I know for further forgeries,” Colborne said, adjusting his spectacles. “If another sheet surfaces, I will send word to you within the hour.”
Edward straightened from the wall. “I will make inquiries among my contacts in the publishing trade. Quietly.”
“And I will keep the Runners on the trail,” the Duke said.
He turned to Lily. “In the meantime, we continue as we are. The engagement holds. The performance holds.”
“Understood,” Lily said.
After that, Sophia and Edward departed first. Lily followed, pausing at the top of the stairs.
The Duke stood in the doorway of Colborne’s office, his coat buttoned now, his expression carrying the quiet gravity of a man who had taken on a responsibility he did not intend to fail.
“Thank you,” Lily said. “For protecting Sophia’s secret. You did not have to do that.”
He regarded her for a moment. The smirk was gone. What remained was something steadier.
“Yes, I did.”
Three words. No charm, no flourish, no performance. Just the simple, immovable certainty of a man who meant what he said.
Lily held his gaze for one breath longer than she should have. Then she turned and descended the stairs, and the night air met her flushed cheeks as she stepped into Sophia’s waiting carriage.
She did not look back. But she thought about those three words for a long time after the carriage pulled away, and she could not quite make them fit inside the shape she had built for Hugo Beaumont in her mind.
The rake. The scoundrel. The man with whipped cream on his face and a smirk that could strip the varnish off a church pew.
Yes, I did.
Perhaps there was more to the Duke of Thornwaite than she had allowed herself to see.
The thought was deeply inconvenient.
CHAPTER 6
“You are staring, old friend.” Edward materialized at Hugo’s elbow with two glasses of champagne.
“I am surveying the room.” Hugo accepted the glass without looking at it. “It is what one does at these events.”
“You are surveying one very specific part of the room.” Edward followed Hugo’s gaze across the Whitmore ballroom to where Lady Lily stood beside her mother.
Her hair was swept up in a simple arrangement threaded with seed pearls. Her gown was a deep emerald green that turned her eyes to something luminous and alluring.
She laughed at something Lady Brimsey said, and the sound carried across the crowd like a note struck on crystal.
Hugo’s chest constricted. It was a physical thing, sudden and unwelcome, a tightening beneath his ribs that spread heat upthrough his throat and back down into his stomach. His pulse kicked. His fingers curled around the stem of the champagne glass.
He had seen beautiful women before. He had bedded them, charmed them, then forgotten them by breakfast. Beauty was currency in his world, spent and replenished without a second thought.
But Lady Lily was not simply beautiful. She was vivid. She occupied space the way a flame occupied a room, drawing every eye without trying, and when she turned her head and caught the light, something in his gut clenched with a ferocity that made him want to set down the glass and leave the building.
