Page 2 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The governess appeared at the side door, her face drained of color.

“Your Grace,” she said, her voice pitched low with something that sounded dangerously like panic. “Lord Frederick… He was with me outside, and then… he was simply gone. I’ve searched the churchyard, I’ve asked everyone…”

Kenneth was moving before she finished speaking. The rational part of his mind informed him calmly that children wandered. That Freddie had a special talent for disappearing into small spaces and emerging grinning minutes later. That panic served no purpose.

The rest of him, the part that had stood in a corridor seven years ago and sworn an oath over two tiny screaming lives, did not care for rationality.

He pushed through the side door into the churchyard. Morning had given way to proper daylight, the kind that illuminated every cobblestone and tree with merciless clarity.

No small boy in sight.

“Freddie!” His voice carried across the yard, startling a cluster of pigeons into flight. “Frederick Stafford!”

No answer.

A woman clutching a prayer book directed him toward the street. An elderly man suggested the lychgate. A footman thought he might have seen a child near the carriages.

Kenneth checked each location with methodical thoroughness, his pace quickening with each empty search.

The rational part of his mind was growing quieter. The other part, the one that remembered red-faced infants and a promise made in a room thick with the smell of blood and sweat, was roaring now, a sound like wind in a tunnel.

He reached the street proper, where carriages lined the curb and early-morning vendors had begun setting up their stalls. A boy of perhaps ten or eleven was leaning against a wall, watching the proceedings with the bored superiority of youth.

“You,” Kenneth said, not bothering with pleasantries. “Have you seen a child? Seven years old, brown hair, in expensive attire.”

The boy considered him unhurriedly. “Might have. Depends what’s in it for me.”

Kenneth reached for his purse. A shilling changed hands.

“There was a nipper,” the boy said, pocketing the coin with practiced ease. “Sneaking about by the carriages. Little lad, looked right fancy. Saw him climb into the back of one just as a lady got in. Red-headed, she was. Pretty, in a round sort of way. Carriage took off toward the west road.”

Red-headed.

Kenneth’s mind sorted through the wedding guests. He had seen precisely one red-headed woman today, and she had been seated in the front pew on the bride’s side. From what he knew, she was Lady Rachel’s sister. The quiet one, the one whose name he could not immediately recall, who had been introduced to him during his only visit to Peltbury House and had said nothing of consequence.

He was moving before the thought had fully formed, shouting instructions to his driver, his mind already calculating distances and routes.

Peltbury House lay to the west. The carriage would have a head start, but his horses were fresh.

As his carriage rattled into motion, Kenneth stared out at the passing streets with a focus fueled by the promise he had made in a room seven years ago to two small lives that entirely depended on him.

He would find his son.

And God help anyone who stood in his way.

Lady Alice Haraway slipped through the service gate of Peltbury House with ease, clearly used to being unnoticed. The cobbled yard behind the kitchens smelled of coal smoke and wet stone.

No one had seen her leave the church. She had counted on that. Her father had been too preoccupied with the final arrangements, the guests, the glorious triumph of securing a duke for his perfect daughter. Rachel had been sequestered with her maids, preparing for her grand entrance.

And Alice… well, Alice had simply walked out through a side door during a particularly fervent prayer, her footsteps swallowed by the organ’s swell.

No one would notice. No one ever did.

She knelt beside the rain barrel that leaned against the kitchen wall and felt beneath it with careful fingers until they closed on rough canvas.

The bag came free with a soft scrape of fabric against stone. Not much inside: a change of clothes, the small savings she had managed to hoard from her quarterly allowance, a letter of introduction to her mother’s cousin in Bath who might, if the woman’s memory of family obligation extended that far, help her find respectable employment as a governess.

Enough to begin. Enough to be someone other than the invisible sister, the too-plump disappointment, the daughter who took up space and returned nothing of value.