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“Under the care or underhim?” said a silly buck, whose company guffawed.
“I heard she threw herself in his carriage and accompanied Lowell to Somerset.” This season’s diamond of the first water looked scandalized.
“The estate is in Westbury,” corrected her less luminous friend.
“It never is! It’s in Shaftesbury!” claimed a lady who fell somewhere between them on the scale of glister.
“Her marriage contracts are all that is beneficial to His Grace,” said a widow.
“She drew them up herself.” Her attending beau looked very sure of himself.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The widow glared at him. “I’ve never heard such nonsense. I wonder that you would even think to repeat it.”
“I believe her uncle is in the card room,” said a chaperone. “He has been bewailing her lost virtue.”
“That is her cousin,” added her charge, gesturing to a spot across the ballroom with her fan. “The youngest one, lurking behind the Dowager Countess of Covington.”
Alfred prowled the edges of the dance floor and, as ever, eavesdropped without giving the appearance of doing so. Bates joined him, well nigh brushing debutantes off his coattails as he came. “How did they find out about the contracts?” Alfred asked.
Bates grinned, and several ladies fluttered their fans with ferocity. “I let it drop in the cloakroom. No one believes it.”
A brief burst of noise at the head of the ballroom’s shallow staircase caused the dancers to stop dancing, the gossipers to stop gossiping, and the orchestra to cease playing with the discordant whine of a dying violin. Alfred felt his entire being expand, from his heart outward, to fill his entire body. His wolf, sulking at attending yet another ball, surged to life as Alfred turned to face the disturbance.
The viscountess’s butler appeared. The room went as silent as the tomb. “Miss Felicity Templeton.”
Alfred turned, and after a beat, a heartbeat, he bowed in perfect time to Felicity’s appearance at the head of the stairs.
* * *
A gasp ricocheted around the room. Felicity stood, as she had stood in her long-ago dream of her debut, and lifted her chin. She was no longer the Antidote thetonhad become inured to snubbing. Her dress had short sleeves, and she carried a fan, but from there her ensemble parted company with the fashion of the day. Her shoulders were exposed in their entirety, calling attention to a décolletage that put lesser-endowed maidens to shame. The gown was a watered silk in leaf green, which ought to have been a travesty for a redhead; it flattered her dewy complexion no end. Rather than fall in a straight column from beneath a sash tied high, the skirt dropped from a fitted waist; and rather than descend into a ruffle or two, layers of fabric spread around her ankles. Her gloves were the palest ivory and lacked cover for her fingers. It was all too unusual and original, and yet she stood as a goddess in the porch of her temple—fearless, composed, magnificent.
She looked only at Alfred. The dancers and the watchers, the mamas and the dowagers, the young bucks and the old had cleared a path on the floor between the two, agog. She waited, and he took one step, another, and another until he reached the stairs. Only then did she go down to him, oblivious of the gawkers.
“Good evening, Miss Templeton,” Alfred said, as he bowed over her hand. His eyes gleamed with humor as he gave her knuckles a good sniff.
“Your Grace.” Felicity executed a flawless curtsy. “I find myself bereft of a partner for the next dance—”
“And well you might, trollop that you are.” The crowd parted at the back of the room, and Ezra Purcell came forward. Alfred moved to stand between her and her perfidious relation, but she stopped him, much as she would have stopped Himself, with a hand on his chest. She would do this, not alone, but with his support of her own authority.
“I am astonished you have the cheek to present yourself here.” Her uncle’s small eyes shifted from her to the duke, splendid in the array due his rank. “And you, Lowell, how low you have gone.”
“I am astonished you think to address me in such a fashion,” Alfred growled, proof positive that Alfie was very near the surface. That would not do: Felicity looked up at her duke, arching a brow. Both wolf and man looked displeased but deferred to her wishes.
“I am astonished,” Felicity replied, “that you are present at atongathering, you who despise them so heartily. That you have made no attempt to liberate me from the duke. That you did not respond to his solicitation for my hand in marriage.” She heard the news rustle throughout the gathering; here was new grist for the mill. “I am astonished you have the gall to accuse anyone else of perfidy, much less accuse them of such before all the world.”
“As to perfidy…” Her uncle gloated. “With tomorrow your birthday, I suspect you are in expectation of your inheritance coming good. What an unhappy surprise that will be. Oh dear, I have all but ruined it, have I not?”
“You refer to my father’s will, which left me dowerless but paradoxically offered me a fortune should I remain unwed,” Felicity said, confirming that rumor once and for all.
“It did strike me as odd,” he mused, “and it preyed upon my conscience, so in your best interests, I took it upon myself to investigate.”
“Much as I did myself. As you well know, since it was you who posted letters for me, to the solicitor in St. Giles.”
Ezra nodded, all beneficence. “But as your guardian, I was able to go where you could not. Oh, dear Felicity, imagine my dismay when I discovered the document is false.”
“Is it?”
“It is. There is nothing at all. As you well know, your poor father went into rather a dramatic decline and gambled away his funds, in a drunken stupor, one supposes. You have no recourse to the house or the land, such as it is, and as there is no male heir, the entirety will revert to the Crown.”
