Page 101 of Courting the Wrong Duke

She lowered her hand slowly, willing her pulse to steady.

It had only been a dream.

Nothing more.

Dreams borrowed faces from waking life and stitched them together with impossible places and impossible feelings. Rivers became gardens. Lilies became walls. Men who were merely pretending to court a lady somehow found their way into her dreams and kissed her as though they had every right.

She closed her eyes and drew a slow, steadying breath.

This was precisely why she needed to remain sensible.

William Sinclair was not courting her.

Not truly.

Every smile they exchanged, every promenade through Hyde Park, every dance, every carefully chosen compliment existed for one purpose alone: to discover what had become of her father.

Everything else belonged to the performance.

She repeated the thought firmly enough that she almost believed it.

When she opened her eyes again, Nelly was waiting beside the dressing table with a folded note resting upon a silver tray.

“A footman from Aldermere House brought this not a quarter of an hour ago, my lady. He said Lord William wished it placed into your hands the moment you woke.”

Rosalind frowned. “So early?”

“Yes, my lady.”

She accepted the note, recognizing William's hand before she had even broken the seal.

Her fingers suddenly felt strangely clumsy.

She unfolded the paper.

Lady Rosalind,

Meet me in the main square as soon as you wake. There is something we must discuss.

William Sinclair

She read it twice. Then a third time.

The warmth left her almost immediately.

Her gaze lingered on the letter.

Surely it concerned her father.

William would never have sent for her at such an early hour without good reason, and nothing short of the investigation seemed important enough to justify such urgency.

She tried to take comfort in that conclusion.

Instead, uneasiness settled quietly beneath her ribs.

The dream refused to release its hold on her thoughts, while the hurried note in her hand only strengthened the unsettling feeling that something had shifted overnight.

She could not have said what it was, only that the world had felt perfectly ordinary when she closed her eyes, and somehow altogether different when she opened them again.