Page 162 of Courting the Wrong Duke

When they parted, Rosalind glanced again at her friend’s rather astonishing attire. “Where did you get those clothes?”

“I borrowed them.”

“From whom?”

“That is not presently important.”

Rosalind suspected someone in the household was going to have a very confusing morning.

“You truly intend to ride all the way to Wales dressed like that?”

Isabella adjusted her hat. “I am not riding hard for two days in skirts.”

Rosalind laughed.

It was probably the most sensible thing anyone had said all night.

Chapter 23

Bryn Hir lay somewhere beyond the next hill.

William had known that for the better part of an hour, yet the knowledge had done nothing to make the distance pass more quickly.

The four horses climbed steadily beneath a gray afternoon sky, their pace slower now after nearly two days of hard riding. Rosalind rode several yards ahead beside Isabella, both women showing remarkably little sign of the exhaustion William knew they must feel.

Isabella’s disguise had attracted more than a few curious looks along the road. Rosalind’s presence had attracted considerably more concern from him.

He had stopped voicing it sometime yesterday.

Mostly because every time he asked whether she needed to rest, she gave him a look suggesting she was considering whether Bryn Hir might be reached more quickly if she simply murdered him and stole his horse.

He smiled despite himself.

Two days. Somehow, they had passed both impossibly slowly and far too quickly.

Perhaps it was the company. Perhaps it was because William had spent nearly every mile trying not to imagine what they might find when they finally reached the estate.

His smile disappeared.

Algernon.

There had been no escaping his brother’s name during the journey, even when none of them spoke it.

The letter remained tucked safely inside William’s coat. Edmund Carlisle’s boots had been left behind, but William could still see the stamped initials inside them.

E.C.

Evidence of a deception his own brother had apparently helped construct.

He had spent most of the first day searching for other explanations.

By the time they settled at the first inn that evening, he had run out of them.

Gabriel had found him sitting on the edge of one of the narrow beds in the room they had been forced to share, staring at nothing.

“You are doing it again,” Gabriel had said.

William had looked up. “Doing what?”