Sophia laughed and clapped her hands together. “That was perfect!”
Nicholas released Isadora, and they all walked together through the crowd, pausing every few minutes to greet someone or another. Isadora spotted a friend she had made at the picnic—an American girl, by the looks of it, but rather less dramatically brash than he had presumed an American would be—and fell back to greet her, Sophia’s hand still tucked in hers.
That left him to walk on ahead alone. The crowd thinned and swelled around him, all bonnets and parasols and the smell of trodden grass and frying sugar.Christ,how long had it been since a day held anything so ordinary as this? Still, he felt a strange longing for his wife and had half a mind to turn back when a familiar dark head caught his eye, bent close to her husband over some private disagreement.
“Eliza?”
His sister looked up from the argument, and her whole face changed. “Nicholas! You are…outside!” She rushed over to him, rising on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“Where’s Marie?” he asked, glancing past her into the crowd.
“Heavens if I know. She wandered off, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since. Fear not, Nick,” she put in when Nicholas stiffened, “she was with a friend,andthere’s a footman with them, so they’re properly chaperoned. I knew she would abandon us at the first moment she could, so I made provisions.”
With a footman and a friend accompanying her, he could hardly find fault, yet the very notion of Marie being free to do as she chose in a place like this set his hackles up all the same. “I don’t like it,” he gritted.
“Well, youmaynot, but you surrendered the responsibility of looking after her long ago,” Eliza retorted, half in jest. “She is a handful for anyone, and that very much includes me. I don’t see you volunteering.”
“I have Sophia.” He tracked a flash of pale hair through the crowd to where his daughter stood haggling with a ribbon-seller at Isadora and her new friend’s side. “And she promises to be just as much of a handful in a few years.”
Eliza laughed lightly. “Well, hopefully Marie will be married soon, which will give us all a little breathing room. You won’t know how eager you’ll be for Sophia to marry until she comes out and is immediately besieged by eager gentlemen seeking her hand in marriage.”
“Does she have a gentleman in mind?” Nicholas asked sharper than he’d meant to. He ran through his wider acquaintance for anyone who might have made an offer for his sister. There were plenty, no doubt; he may have made himself a stranger through her girlhood, but he had never let her want for anything money could buy. Pin money fit for a princess, and now, a dowry to match.
“I… believe shemight,” Eliza said, a trifle mysteriously. “Oh, there she is now!” She pointed, but when Nicholas turned, all he saw was Oliver Chant waving at them.
Nicholas’s two identities collided.
Will, the prizefighter, who would have been at the fights this afternoon had he not made a silly promise a week ago to his daughter. AndNicholas, the Duke. Two men who were the same and not the same, and whose identities had been exposed in the blink of an eye.
Chant stared at him as though he had never seen him before, and Nicholas knew this was it—his gig was up. He would have to come clean to everybody.
But first, he looked around for Isadora. If he were to come clean to Chant, he ought to also come clean to Isadora, and to do thatfirst. Now that they’d been together, and now that he’d confided in her about Grace, if they were to have any chance of the happiness she so craved, he would have to tell her everything.
When he saw her, however, she and Caroline were not alone.
No—standing with them was none other than Nathaniel Windham.
Nicholas saw red. That blackguard had over and over embroiled himself in their lives, making things difficult, and now here he was targeting Isadora in public, making Nicholas look foolish, and no doubt upsetting Isadora, too.
Not to mention Sophia.
“Excuse me,” he muttered to Eliza, and whirled, striding back to Isadora and Windham, who was still smirking positively slickly beside her. The man’s gaze flicked up, and Nicholas gave his coldest smile. “Pardon me,” he snarled. “But what the devil do you think you’re doing, cornering my wife?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Relief swept through Isadora so sharply that her knees nearly buckled. Nicholas stood before her, broad-shouldered and forbidding, having planted himself squarely between herself and Mr. Windham. The look he directed at the man was cold enough to frost glass.
Caroline wiggled her brows at Isadora, who tried her utmost not to look as though she might swoon from the tension.
Mr. Windham’s smirk faltered very slightly at the duke’s sudden arrival. “Your Grace,” he started. “I was merely greeting Her Grace. As an old friend… ofsorts.”
Caroline snorted. “Not much of a friendship between them if you don’t mind me saying, Your Grace.”
Mr. Windham’s lip curled. “Forgive me for not holding much stock in your opinion,Miss…?”
“Hensley,” she said sweetly. “Do try to remember it on your way down”
Mr. Windham gaped at her for a moment, perhaps astonished that an American would speak to him in that way. Then again, he always did have an inflated sense of self-importance, as though he deserved something more than the average gentleman.
