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Devin had promised himself that ten minutes’ acquaintance would chase away the odd fascination he felt for the Duke of Lindow’s stepdaughter.

Viola wasn’t a real Wilde, as she herself had said. Not a likely prospect for a Duchess of Wynter, and Otis and Hazel agreed. Too shy. Too short. Too funny. Not to mention too fond of a vicar.

Ten minutes ago, he had been sitting in a near stupor, listening to a group of young ladies prattle on about the baby monkeys in the Royal Menagerie, when Viola walked in the door, wearing a confection that seemed to float around her and at the same time favor her bosom. When she glanced at him and turned pink, his entire body came alert.

The Duke of Wynter wasn’t used to questioning his decisions. It was with a certain sense of satisfaction that he realized he had been wrong to doubt himself.

He had found a treasure in the Lindow library, and he merely had to win it away from a vicar. How hard could that be?

Even given the fact that his treasure had made it clear that she had no interest in his courtship, his title, or his person.

Lady Knowe strolled up. “Time to join us for tea, my dears. The fiddlers are tuning their instruments.”

Viola rose when everyone else did, and somehow she found herself not only walking with the duke, but seated beside him as well.

“May I help you remove your gloves, Miss Astley?” he asked.

Viola glanced to the left and right and discovered that indeed, other young ladies were removing their gloves. Where a gentleman was available to help them, they had accepted his assistance.

“Very well,” she said.

Her gloves went almost to her elbows, after all.

The duke bent over her hand and pulled gently at the tips of all five fingers. She stared down at his hair—thick, dark, and unpowdered, unlike many gentlemen in the room—and felt a strange qualm in her stomach, not at all like the warning of imminent gastric distress.

“I’ve never done this before,” Wynter said, flashing a glance at her.

“There’s nothing very difficult about it,” she said. “Just pull it off, if you please, Your Grace.”

He looked up at her again, his bare right hand holding her left. “It’s the first time I will have seen your hand. You wore gloves at the ball.”

Viola frowned at him. “Mine are perfectly normal fingers, Your Grace. You’re making a spectacle of us.”

“I don’t mind,” he said with a wry twist of his mouth as he picked up her other hand and began tugging each of her fingers free of her glove. “Very small,” he observed.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Viola moaned. “I shall go sit elsewhere, if you don’t stop it. We aren’t suited, remember?”

His large fingers curled around her hand, hiding it from sight. “If you run away, it will cause more gossip.”

“Stop it,” she ordered, knowing that her cheeks were pink.

Slowly he unwrapped his hand from around hers. “Am I allowed to say that I think your hand is very beautiful?”

“Absolutely not!”

In the ensuing hour or so, Viola danced with every eligible gentleman at the party, including the Duke of Wynter. At one point her stomach began to clench, after a gentleman asked her too many questions about what it was like being “raised with the Wildes,” but she caught sight of Wynter over the man’s shoulder.

He was looking at her, not his partner. He nodded.

Her stomach uncurled and settled. “I wasn’t raised ‘with’ the Wildes,” she told her dance partner, and gave him a wide smile. “I am a Wilde.”

Why hadn’t she understood that? The most important thing was to know the truth herself. That was what Joan had tried to tell her. Joan’s father was almost certainly a Prussian count, but she knew herself to be the duke’s daughter, and she didn’t need their father’s assurance.

“Of course,” the gentleman said respectfully. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

When Sir Reginald called the last dance, the Duke of Wynter bowed before Viola as if there was no question where he would be.

As if there was no question with whom he would dance.