Page 69 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

She took his arm.

They were in the carriage in twelve minutes.

The city blurred past the windows in the way it always did at night, the gas lamps tracing lines of orange light along the wet pavement, the late traffic still moving on the main roads.

Alice sat with her hands folded in her lap and listened to the wheels on the cobblestones and the distant sound of London going about its business, and felt the quiet of the carriage settle around her.

Kenneth sat across from her. He was looking out the window, his jaw still set, his hands open on his thighs in the deliberate way she had come to recognize as him preventing his hands from curling into fists.

He turned away from the window. His eyes found hers and stayed there, and she felt the force of his attention the way she always felt it, close and deliberate.

“He had no right to approach you.”

“He was civil.”

“He was calculating.” His voice was even, and the evenness had the quality of something held still by pressure. “He has been writing to the house. I have not replied. I did not anticipate—” He stopped for a moment. “He should not have come near you.”

Alice held his gaze. The carriage moved through Mayfair, through the familiar geometry of squares and terraces, and she thought about Tidswell’s face and the way his warmth had felt like an instrument, and about Kenneth’s voice arriving at her shoulder before she had heard his step.

She thought also about what she had been told, in a conversation at a stream weeks ago, while three boys ate sugared almonds on a bank: that Kenneth had never loved his late wife, that he had married her out of duty, that guilt was not grief but had worn grief’s face for seven years.

She thought about a man who had written letters to the house that Kenneth had not replied to, and who had appeared at a ball and asked to meet the last living pieces of the woman he had loved.

“He was in love with her, wasn’t he?” she realized aloud.

Kenneth looked at her for a long moment. “Yes,” he confirmed. “Before. She did not return it.”

“He resents you for that.”

Another pause. A longer one.

The carriage turned the corner onto Park Lane, and the horse’s pace steadied on the wider road.

“He has made that clear,” Kenneth said.

“And you did not tell me.”

“I did not wish to worry you unnecessarily.”

“Kenneth.” She said his name with the quiet emphasis of a woman who has had a great deal of practice pressing the point without pressing too hard. “He approached me tonight and asked me to bring his request to your attention. He wanted me to advocate for him with you. Whether he intended it or not, that was the position he put me in.”

“You are right.” It arrived without preamble or qualification. “I should have told you.”

The carriage slowed before Grosvenor Square.

Alice looked at his hands, still open on his thighs. “You said that you wanted to tell me something. At the ball.”

He looked at her.

“What was it?”

The carriage had stopped. The footman was at the door. Kenneth did not move.

“Not here,” he said.

She could have pressed. She considered pressing and decided against it, not out of fear, but because she recognized the line between a door being closed and a door being held. She had been learning that distinction for months.

She descended from the carriage and let the house swallow her into its familiar warmth, and she heard his footsteps behind her in the entrance hall.