Page 94 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

He bowed stiffly and turned away.

Rowland followed.

The company parted to let them through. Nobody applauded. Selina was grateful for that. Applause would have made the evening into a performance, and too much of her life had already been performed for other people.

Only when the doors closed behind the two men did conversation begin again.

It returned slowly: a fan opening, the murmur of voices, a glass placed upon a tray. The musicians looked towards Lady Marwood, uncertain whether they were expected to resume.

Mrs Loxley remained beside Selina. The two women looked at one another properly for the first time.

“Would you like to go upstairs?” Selina asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“I shall come with you.”

Mrs Loxley hesitated, then shook her head. “If you do not mind, Your Grace, I should like to be alone for a little while.”

“Of course.”

Mrs Loxley touched Selina’s hand once, briefly.

“Thank you for letting me speak.”

Selina could think of no answer that did not make too much of it. She merely inclined her head.

Lady Marwood’s housekeeper came forward, and Mrs Loxley went with her.

Selina turned to Nathaniel. “We won,” she said.

“We did.”

She looked towards the doors through which Giles and Rowland had gone, then back at him. “You stayed quiet. Even when you hated it.”

“You asked me to.”

Something in her expression softened.

“You trusted me.”

Nathaniel held out his hand. “Always.”

Selina placed hers in it.

The room was beginning to recover around them, conversation returning by degrees, but she had spent enough of herself beneath its attention.

“I should like some air.”

Nathaniel offered his arm.

“Come.”

She took it, and together they left the heat and voices of the ballroom for the tall doors standing open upon the night.

Chapter Twenty

The terrace ran the length of the ballroom’s tall windows, and beyond its balustrade Lady Marwood’s gardens fell away into darkness. The voices behind them came muffled through the glass, the room already beginning to make conversation out of what it had witnessed.