Page 67 of Duke of Sapphire

She turned back. Her chin was up, her eyes were bright, and she looked like someone who had been handed something real and was deciding how much weight to put on it.

He offered his arm, and she took it.

“I am going to need you to warn me,” Charlotte said, as they moved toward the door, “if anyone’s tiara is more impressive than mine. I want time to prepare.”

“No one’s tiara will be more impressive than yours.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I have been to a considerable number of balls,” Henry said. “I know that.”

“Because you are a duke or because you have an exceptional eye for jewelry?”

“Both,” he said. “Historically, both.”

She laughed at that—the short, genuine kind—and they went out together into the evening.

“You are not to worry,” Henry said.

The carriage had stopped. Through the window, the torchlight was bright on the steps and the queue of arriving guests stretched halfway to the street.

Charlotte looked out of the window then at him. “You are telling me not to worry,” she said, “as we are about to be announced to every person of consequence in English Society, most of whom have not expected me to become a duchess.” She smiled, and it was the nervous kind, the one that was working extremely hard. “That is the irony, you see. The advice and the situation are entirely at odds.”

“They are not at odds.”

“They are considerably at odds.”

“Charlotte.” He held her gaze. “You are wearing the Sappherton sapphires. You are the Duchess of Sappherton. And you have faced considerably worse than a ballroom.”

She looked at him. “You are referring to the tree.”

“I am referring to Scotland generally.”

The footman opened the door. Henry descended first and offered his hand. She took it and stepped down. They went up the steps together.

The majordomo had a voice built for exactly this purpose. It carried across the full width of the entrance hall and died away in the room beyond it like a stone dropped in still water.

“His Grace, the Duke of Sappherton. Her Grace, the Duchess of Sappherton.”

The room turned.

Not all at once. It was more gradual than that, a current moving through the assembled guests—heads shifting, fans pausing, conversations trailing off mid-sentence. Henry had been announced at a hundred balls and had never registered the sound of a room turning toward him with quite this quality of attention. It was not toward him. It was toward Charlotte.

He watched it happen. She stood at his side in the blue silk with the sapphires at her throat and held herself very correctly, chin level, and said nothing. A few people near the door smiled. Several were already moving toward them.

Then, for approximately the next forty minutes, Henry stood at Charlotte’s side, shook hands, made introductions, and watched person after person find her warm and charming and entirely worth speaking to, and found himself, to his considerable surprise, irritated by all of them.

Not at Charlotte. That was the thing. He was irritated at the gentlemen who found reasons to bow a fraction too long over her hand, and at the matrons who asked questions that were really just excavations.

Every time a young lord laughed at something Charlotte said, Henry found something adjacent to require his attention. He was aware that this was not rational.

He was also aware that he had no intention of examining it at present.

During a brief respite near the edge of the room, Charlotte leaned slightly toward him. “You are scowling,” she said.

“I am not scowling.”

“Your face is contorted as though you are in pain.”