Page 21 of The Courtship Dance

“But how have I never heard this? I mean, of course I would not have known it at the time, but since I’ve been returned to my family…I cannot imagine why Aunt Odelia or my grandmother or someone has never brought it up.”

“They never knew about it, either,” Rochford replied. “It was a secret engagement.” He sighed, and suddenly he looked older, weary. “Francesca had just turned eighteen. I’d known her practically all her life, of course. Selbrooke’s estate, Redfields, bordered on my lands at Dancy Park. But that last winter, when she was seventeen, and I saw her…” A faint smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “It was as if the scales fell from my eyes. It was Boxing Day, and we held a ball. There she was, wearing long skirts at last, with a blue ribbon in her hair that matched her eyes. I was stunned.” He glanced at his companion ruefully.

“I know the feeling,” Gideon assured him in a dry tone.

“Yes, I imagine you do, at that. So…I fell in love with her. I tried not to. I told myself she was too young. She seemed to return the feeling, but I knew that she had not even made her debut yet. She had not been to London parties, only country things. She knew few men, beyond her relatives and the locals. How was she to truly know her heart?”

Rochford was silent for a moment as he took a drink, then gazed reflectively into his glass. When he looked up again, his face was set, all emotion carefully absent from it. “Finally, I could not bring myself to wait until she had had her first Season. I feared that if I stood back, some other man would move in and sweep her off her feet.”

“So you compromised by making the engagement secret,” Gideon said.

“Exactly. I could see the stars in her eyes. I knew that she thought she loved me. But I feared that she was simply dazzled by her first romance. I could not bear to set her free, with no knowledge of my regard for her, my hopes for the two of us. But I did not want her irrevocably bound to me by a public engagement. If she changed her mind or if she realized that she did not love me as much as she had thought she did, then she would be able to break it off without being subjected to the scandal.”

“I see.” Gideon had not been raised among his peers, but he had learned enough about the society in which he now lived to know that a broken engagement was an enormous scandal that could haunt a woman, in particular, for the rest of her life. As a result, both parties rarely cried off, even if one or the other began to have doubts about the upcoming marriage.

“Unfortunately, in the end I proved to be right. She did not love me enough.”

“What happened?”

The duke shrugged. “She was deceived. She was made to believe that I was having an affair with another woman. I tried to tell her what had really happened, but she would not believe me. She refused to see me. By the end of the Season, she had become engaged to Lord Haughston. And that was the end of it.”

“Until now.”

Rochford nodded. “Until now.” He polished off the liquor in his glass and reached out to pour another drink. “Recently she discovered that she had been lied to, that the woman in question had arranged for Francesca to find the two of us apparently in flagrante delicto. She realized that I had told her the truth and that she had been wrong, that she had treated me unfairly.” He raised the glass toward Gideon in a kind of salute, saying, “So she decided to make it up to me by finding me a wife.”

Gideon watched silently as the other man downed the drink. He had never seen Rochford consume liquor at quite the pace he was drinking it now. Of course, neither had he ever seen him looking quite so…off balance. The duke was one of the most self-contained men he had ever met, rare to show anger or even irritation. But tonight, clearly, he was disturbed, fury bubbling just below the surface, seemingly ready to jump out at any moment, and it was clear that he was having to hold it in with some effort.

“Why the devil did she take it into her head to do that?” Rochford exclaimed as he set his glass down with a thud on the small table between them. “God, and to think for a little while I was fool enough to believe—”

When he did not go on, Gideon prodded quietly, “To believe what?”

Rochford shook his head and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing.” He paused, then went on. “She told me what she had found out, and she apologized. And then she maneuvered it so that I agreed to escort her and Lady Althea Robart to a play. I thought…”

“That she wanted to go back to—”

“No!” Rochford replied quickly. “Good Gad, no. There’s no question of that, of course. But I thought, perhaps, she hoped we could be better friends now. Then she started throwing Lady Althea at me. Lady Althea, of all people!”

“I don’t know her.”

“You don’t want to,” the duke told him bluntly. “She is pretty enough, but too high in the instep for me. Not to mention that after ten minutes of her conversation, one is ready to go to sleep.”

“Do you still love Lady Haughston?”

Rochford glanced at him, then quickly away, saying gruffly, “Nonsense. Of course not. That is, well, of course I have some degree of feeling for the woman. We are old…not exactly friends, of course, but, in a way she is almost family.”

Gideon cocked a skeptical eyebrow at that description, but refrained from saying anything.

“I have not been nursing an unrequited love for her all these years,” the duke went on firmly. “We could never go back to what we were, what we felt. It has been fifteen years, after all. We both lost those feelings long ago. I’m not angry because I hoped the two of us might—No, it’s just Francesca’s absolute gall in deciding to take over my life. Everyone lets her manage things. She is terribly good at it, maneuvering and arranging.”

A smile lifted the other man’s lips. “I have had experience.”

“But that she should decide to do it for me!” Rochford’s dark eyes snapped. “That she thinks she is better able to choose a wife than I am. That I need her help in getting a woman to marry me!” A muscle in his jaw jumped as he clenched his teeth.

Rochford poured himself a fourth drink and took a healthy slug of it. “Then she has the nerve to preach duty to me. To me! As if I were some young fool who flits about indulging my whims, with no concern for my name or family. As if I had not devoted my life to the title and the estate since I was eighteen years old. To top it off, she implies that I am getting past the age of marrying. As if I must seize some silly girl and father children as fast as I can before I am no longer capable of reproducing!”

Gideon smothered a smile. “I feel sure she did not mean to imply that.”

The duke made a disgruntled noise and sipped his drink.