Page 72 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The dam, as it turned out, required very little additional pressure.

She felt the first tear before she knew it was coming, quick and involuntary, and her breath came out unsteadily. She pressed the back of her wrist to her face, mortified.

She was in a dusty attic, at half past midnight, coming apart in front of the one person she had been most determined not to come apart in front of.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I do not know why I am⁠—”

“Alice.”

“It is nothing. It is the evening, it has been a long⁠—”

“Stop,” he said softly. He leaned forward and took her gloved hand, but she felt the warmth of his touch everywhere anyway. “You do not have to explain it.”

She looked at him. Her vision was blurry, which was infuriating.

“Tidswell,” she said. “And Lady Haverstock, who told me at the refreshments table with the most perfect manners that Theresa played magnificently and danced flawlessly.” She pressed her wrist to her face again. “And Rachel… I do not know whether she’s safe, or frightened, or cold somewhere. And your sons, who I am very fond of, and who will always be her sons and not mine. And⁠—”

She stopped. She was not going to say the last part. She had held the last part at arm’s length since the ball, since Lady Haverstock’s careful smile, and she was not going to say it in an attic at midnight with her face already betraying her.

“And?” Kenneth coaxed.

She closed her eyes. “The Cheswick sisters,” she said quietly. “At the garden party. I told you I was fine, and I was fine, I managed it. Only tonight, Lady Haverstock said the same things in different terms, and I found I had…” She breathed. “Less practice with it than I thought.”

He was very still beside her.

“What did she say?” he asked.

“Nothing I have not heard before.” She pressed her lips together and looked at Cassiopeia on the wall. “Nothing that was not said more plainly during the dinner at Harcourt Hall. Only she said it at the Worthington ball, after I had danced in front of two hundred and fifty people, and⁠—”

She stopped again. She could feel the heat rising in her face, the particular heat of humiliation admitted aloud, the thing she had been least willing to give the room it required.

“I am not Theresa,” she said. “I am never going to be Theresa. I do not play the pianoforte. I cannot embroider. I bobbed for an apple at a village fair and did not know what cotillion steps went in which order until three weeks ago when I counted them on my bedroom floor in the dark.” Her voice had gone thin at the edges. “And there is no version of this story in which I am the wife anyone would have chosen for you.”

“Alice.” His voice had dropped. “Look at me.”

She turned. He had shifted, the space between the chairs reduced to almost nothing, and his hand had moved from hers to her face, warm and sure, his thumb brushing the curve of her cheek where the tear had fallen.

“I did not choose you,” he said. “You are right about that. I chose Rachel because the matchmaker recommended her and she came from good stock, and I needed someone to manage the boys. That is the entirety of the thought I gave to the matter.” His thumb moved, and she felt it in the line of her jaw, at the base of her throat. “But then I met you.”

She hadn’t expected the softness in his voice.

“I did not choose you,” he said again. “And I have thought about that fact more than is comfortable in the months since. Whether it was good fortune, providence, or simply the particular variety of chaos that Freddie causes wherever he goes, what I am certain of is this…”

He tilted her chin, and she felt the focus of his gaze the way she felt firelight, a warmth on the skin that was also a weight.

“I have never once, in the months since our wedding, wished I had chosen differently,” he declared.

She could not look away from him. This was the difficulty with Kenneth—he was not performing sincerity. He was a man who kept everything armored, and when the armor came off, even a piece of it, what came through had the quality of something that had been under considerable pressure for a long time.

“You should find Rachel.” Her voice was small and not entirely steady. “You said⁠—”

“You know that I have men in Wiltshire,” he said. “Three of them, since this morning. I sent the third while you were getting ready for the ball.” He looked at her with that careful, particular attention. “Carver will find her. I am certain of it.”

“How can you be certain?”

“Because I am paying him a great deal of money to be thorough,” he said. “And because your sister is demonstrably resourceful, which is a quality I recognize, and women who are resourceful tend to survive.”

Something moved in her chest, the particular dangerous something that arrived when he was like this, when the distance dissolved, when she could see him clearly.