Page 37 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“When my sister was otherwise engaged.” Alice took a sip of wine. “Which was frequently.”

The first course arrived. Consommé, followed by turbot in a cream sauce, followed by roast partridge and a dressed salad. Alice served herself quietly. She was hungry. The ratafia had done nothing to settle the evening’s accumulated tension, and the food smelled of butter and rosemary and comfort.

The commentary started before the second bite.

“Your Grace.” Mrs. Forsythe’s voice cut across the table during a pause in the naval captain’s monologue. She gestured toward Alice’s plate with her fork. “Goodness, you have been generous with yourself.” Her gaze traveled from Alice’s plate to her neckline, lingered, and returned. “Perhaps a touch less partridge and a touch more salad might be advisable. The green suits you, but the cut is ambitious for your figure as it stands. One would hate to see it strained further by a third course.”

The table fell silent. Not the comfortable silence of a conversational lull, but the airless quiet that descended when someone had said the unsayable and every person present was calculating the cost of responding.

Alice’s fork hovered above her plate. She looked at her food. At the portions she had taken without thinking, because she was a grown woman eating dinner, and it had not occurred to her that filling her plate required justification.

It occurred to her now. Every face at the table told her so.

Heat climbed from her chest to her throat. She reached for her wine glass.

Kenneth’s voice carried from four seats away, low and precise, accustomed to rooms far larger than this one.

“Mrs. Forsythe.” He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Every head at the table turned toward him. “My wife will eat as much or as little as she pleases. She will take the partridge, and the turbot, and the salad, and the pudding, and whatever else this table has to offer, in any quantity she desires, at any meal, on any day, for the rest of her life. I will never allow my wife to go hungry. And if anyone at this table or any other presumes to comment on what she consumes, or how she looks while consuming it, they will answer to me. Personally.”

The silence held. Mrs. Forsythe’s hand had frozen midway between her plate and her mouth. Harcourt, at the head of the table, stared at his partridge as though it contained instructions for managing the crisis.

“Is that understood?” Kenneth’s gaze swept across the table. His voice had not risen above conversational volume, and that restraint made the words land harder. “I trust I will not need to repeat myself.”

Mrs. Forsythe set her fork down. “I meant no offence, Your Grace. I was merely⁠—”

“You were merely nothing.” Kenneth turned back to his plate. “Mind your own plate, Mrs. Forsythe. And let my wife mind hers.”

Alice stared at the candle flame near her plate until the blur of heat and light resolved into a steady point.

She looked up. Four seats away, Kenneth had returned to his meal. His hand rested on the stem of his wine glass, his profile carved in sharp, unyielding lines against the candlelight.

As if sensing her gaze, Kenneth turned his head. Their eyes met across the silent table. His dark eyes held no lingering anger, only a quiet, grounded intensity that made her chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with Mrs. Forsythe.

There was no smug triumph in his gaze. Just a silent, immovable promise that had been spoken aloud and meant to its absolute core.

For a breathless second, the tension in Alice’s shoulders unspooled. She offered him the smallest, most fragile smile, an unspoken thank you that barely parted her lips.

Kenneth’s thumb caressed the crystal stem of his glass, his eyes softening by a fraction in answer, before he inclined his head and picked up his fork.

The meal continued. Conversation resumed in cautious fragments, steered by Harcourt toward the safe harbors of crop yields and the construction of a new bridge over the river Derwent.

Alice spoke when spoken to. She answered the naval captain’s questions about Bearmoor’s coverts. She complimented Lady Harcourt on the turbot.

She did not look at Kenneth again until the pudding arrived.

When she did, she found him watching her. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes held hers across the length of the table, across the silver and the crystal and the candle flames.

She shivered.

This man, who had married her for convenience and closed a door in her face on their wedding night, had just laid siege to a dining room on her behalf without a moment’s hesitation.

And in that moment, she felt more like the Duchess of Bearmoor than she ever had.

Chapter Twelve

Port and Madeira appeared on silver trays as the pudding trays were cleared away.

Alice sipped her Madeira and let the sweetness settle on her tongue. Mrs. Forsythe had not spoken since Kenneth’s intervention. She sat rigidly in her chair, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on a point above the fireplace that appeared to offer her the comfort of total neutrality.