Instead, he inclined his head.
“Very well,” he said with more patience than he felt.
But when she began to turn, he caught her hand, his touch light enough that she could shake him off if she wanted to.
She didn’t.
“If you are not there in ten minutes,” he said, “I am coming to find you.”
He knew the words were too possessive the instant they left his mouth. Overbearing. Heavy handed.
Precisely the sort of thing he had ridden five days to promise he would no longer do.
Beatrice looked down at his hand around hers. Then back up.
“A quarter of an hour,” she said.
Gideon’s thumb moved once over her gloved knuckles before he released her.
Her mouth curved.
Only slightly.
Barely enough to count.
But Gideon, who had spent four weeks starving for the smallest sign of her, took that almost-smile like a feast.
HE CAME
Beatrice stepped into the supper room and stopped short.
Oh, dear.
The room itself was lovely. Candles glowed along the sideboards. Flowers spilled from silver bowls. The long tables gleamed beneath snowy linen. But instead of arranging the ices near the kitchens, the footmen had set them in pride of place at the center of the room, directly beneath the candles.
Already, one lemon ice looked dangerously close to becoming soup.
“No,” Beatrice said, with more calm than she felt. “No, no, no. The ices must be moved at once. And the syllabub should not be beside the fish. Good heavens, why is the syllabub beside the fish?”
The next fifteen minutes became twenty.
Then twenty-five.
By the time the supper room was no longer in danger of disgracing Ambrosia’s first large entertainment as duchess, nearly half an hour had passed.
But Gideon would wait.
Wouldn’t he?
Because he had come.
Gideon had come.
And he had said?—
Beatrice paused just outside the supper room door while guests began flowing past her in eager, hungry clusters.
“I was wrong.”
