Page 54 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Louisa blinked. “The punch, Your Grace?”

“A matter of considerable delicacy.”

She nearly laughed, catching herself just in time. Lady Ashby, however, looked genuinely alarmed, one hand pressed to her chest.

“Good heavens. Has someone tampered with it?”

Julian did not so much as blink, his composure entirely unshaken. “Nothing so serious, I assure you. Merely a difference of opinion regarding the amount of citrus.”

“Well,” Lady Ashby declared, “that must certainly be settled.”

“Without delay,” Julian agreed, and offered Louisa his arm with a solemnity that almost undid her on the spot.

Louisa waited until they had turned the corner to the adjoining gallery, well out of Lady Ashby’s hearing, before surrendering to laughter, one hand pressed against a cool marble pillar to steady herself.

“Citrus?”

Julian looked almost offended. “It was the first thing that occurred to me. I had perhaps three seconds to invent a crisis before I reached you.”

“You could have at least chosen something plausible, Your Grace.”

“Lady Ashby believed every word.”

“Lady Ashby also believes that every road in England eventually leads to ruin, and that the fate of three counties rests on a single stone bridge near her village. I would not put too much faith in her judgment as a measure of plausibility.”

His laugh was quiet but unmistakable, a low sound that seemed to catch her somewhere just beneath the ribs. “You looked as though another five minutes would have finished you entirely. I confess I had begun to fear for your composure.”

Louisa looked at him. “Was I so obvious?”

“Only to someone looking.” The words escaped him so easily that she doubted he realized he had said them.

Her smile faded just a little. Because he had been looking.

She turned the thought over as they made their way back toward the ballroom proper, Julian offering some further observation about Lord Winterbourne's taste in orchestral arrangements that she only half registered, her mind still caught on the small, unguarded honesty of what he’d said.

Three-quarters of an hour later, having danced once with young Mr. Wycliffe and endured a further ten minutes of his mother’s opinions on the proper cultivation of hothouse peaches, she spotted Julian across the room.

He was standing near the card room doorway with three gentlemen whose conversation had somehow escalated into a spirited disagreement over tenant boundary lines, one of them gesturing with considerable emphasis at a pocket map he had apparently produced for the specific purpose of settling the argument.

He caught sight of her over the shoulder of the nearest gentleman, a plea in his eyes. He mouthed the words, “Help me.”

She recognized the look at once and felt her mouth twitch, because it must have been the same look she had worn not an hour ago, trapped beneath Lady Ashby’s relentless enthusiasm for drainage.

She crossed the room without hurry, arranging her expression into something suitably urgent, and laid a light hand on Julian’s sleeve. “Your Grace.”

Every head turned.

“I have developed a raging need to be with my husband; I feel a headache coming on.” She placed a finger on her temple and gave her best theatrical look of anguish. “Of course.” Julian turned to the gentlemen with an expression of profound regret, his relief almost comically immediate. “You will forgive me. A wife's summons cannot be ignored.”

They escaped together, and once safely out of earshot, Louisa hid her smile behind her fan.

Julian glanced sideways at her, his expression warm and grateful. “There is no headache or dying desire to be with me, I take it.”

“None whatsoever. I invented it, much as you invented your punch crisis.” Louisa allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. “I thought it only fair, given how you rescued me not an hour ago.”

“I suspected as much.”

“You looked considerably more trapped than I did with Lady Ashby, if I am being honest.”