Page 63 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

Kenneth sat across from her. He had said nothing since the carriage rolled away from Grosvenor Square, which was not unusual, but tonight his silence had a particular quality she could not name, directed and deliberate, the silence of a man attending carefully to something he was not looking at.

She knew, because she had been doing the same thing for the past ten minutes. She was not looking at him; she was looking at the illuminated house and the procession of silk-clad guests.

She was aware of every inch between them with the acute specificity that had been her affliction since the clearing, since the garden and the wall and his hands and his mouth and the thing he had said to her afterward when he smoothed his coat and told her they should go back.

“Your body is not a thing to be endured.”

She pressed her palms flat against her skirts.

“You are quiet,” he remarked.

“You are also quiet,” she replied. “I did not wish to disturb the symmetry.”

He half-smirked at her words, then asked, “Are you nervous?”

“No.” She held his gaze. “Are you?”

“I never attend a ball without a measure of apprehension.” He said it with the flat evenness of a confession that cost nothing. “The Worthington music tends toward the overlong.”

“You dislike dancing.”

“I am indifferent to dancing.” He looked at her. “But I am not indifferent to tonight.”

The carriage stopped. The footman opened the door, and Alice accepted his hand and stepped down onto Brook Street with her chin at the correct angle and her pulse behaving in a manner she found entirely unreasonable.

The ballroom was full.

Candles burned in chandeliers above them. The musicians were arranged at the far end of the room. The smell was warm wax and hothouse flowers and the faint, layered sweetness of too many perfumes in one enclosed space.

Alice stood at Kenneth’s shoulder as they were announced, and she felt the shift, the familiar tide of turning heads, of conversations that paused and resumed at a lower volume.

She had felt it at every gathering since the wedding. By now, she had learned to absorb it the way one absorbed a cold draught through a window left unlatched: unpleasant, present, and not particularly surprising.

What she had not anticipated was the woman standing twelve feet away, near the refreshments table, who observed her entrance with the composed attention of a person who had been waiting for precisely this.

She was not someone Alice recognized. She was perhaps forty, impeccably dressed, her face arranged in an expression of social pleasantness but communicating nothing of the kind. Beside her stood a younger woman, perhaps twenty-two, fair-haired and watchful, who was currently failing to pretend she was looking at the musicians.

Alice noted them and looked away.

Lady Worthington received them with genuine warmth, which was a relief, and her husband shook Kenneth’s hand with the enthusiasm of a man who had business reasons to be pleased about the Duke of Bearmoor’s presence and saw no virtue in concealing it.

They moved away from the receiving line into the press of the ballroom. Kenneth’s hand settled briefly on the small of Alice’s back, guiding her through a gap in the crowd, and the contact sent a heat up her spine that she repressed quickly.

“Your Grace.” Lord Ashton appeared from the direction of the card room, hand outstretched, wearing the expression of a man who had been waiting specifically to intercept a target. They shook hands. “Didn’t expect to see you tonight. The quarterly shipping figures came in. Have you had Pemberton look at them yet?”

“Tuesday,” Kenneth said.

“Good. Tuesday.” Lord Ashton turned to Alice, and the warmth in his expression, though tempered by habit, was genuine. “Your Grace, lovely to see you.”

“And you, Lord Ashton.”

Kenneth looked at her, a question in his eyes.

“Go,” Alice urged. “I am perfectly well.”

He held her gaze for a beat longer than the occasion required and then moved away with Ashton toward the card room corridor, his back straight, the crowd parting around him the way crowds parted around men who expected them to.

Alice turned to find herself alone for the first time all evening.