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Drew would be out searching for him if he didn’t have to be here, to warn his sister.
Lady Beatrice will be kidnapped.
Not on his watch.
He shouldn’t have agreed to the ball, but it had made his mother so happy that he hadn’t had the heart to say no. Especially when he’d seen the hurt in her eyes when she spoke of how long he’d been absent.
The same hurt in Beatrice’s hazel eyes.
The violins were out of tune, couldn’t anyone else hear it? The shrill scraping sound of strings about to snap.
The gossips clustered in knots, waiting for him to slip up and display some sign of madness, their sharp gazes dissecting him like a fresh cadaver in the lecture hall of a medical college.
He knew what London thought of him.
Such a dreadful shame, a duke gone so far astray. Hiding in that cursed house.Wild and uncivilized as the Cornish coastline. Gone half mad because of his ordeal, sympathizing with his kidnapper and ranting about tenant rights. Sweating in the fields like a common laborer.
He must be as mad as they said he was. He couldn’t bring any of these London hothouse flowers to Thornhill House. They would wither after one winter.
He wanted a marriage of convenience with a stouthearted and sturdy lady who wouldn’t suffer an attack of vapors at the sight of cobwebs, leaky roofs, or mold creeping along a wall.
A lady who had experience with living in the countryside beyond the occasional summer retreat to a well-tended, luxurious family seat.
He loved Thornhill House in all its time-eaten, rickety-boned glory. It had been long deserted when he arrived, cared for by only a skeleton staff of elderly retainers nearly as decrepit and tottering as the desolate mansion they tended.
He’d renovated one wing of the house, and would start on the next section soon, but it was in no state to receive a pampered young lady with expectations of luxury and modern amenities.
Beatrice twirled past him in the arms of a bored-looking dandy with ridiculously forward-swept hair. How did the dandies make their hair stay that way? It looked like tree branches trained by sea winds to grow all in one direction.
His sister had a martyred expression on her face. She wasn’t enjoying the dance any more than the dandy was. Mother had forced her to remove her spectacles. She stumbled and her partner sneered.
Drew’s heart clenched into a fist. If any man in the room so much as cracked a joke at his sister’s expense he would pummel him to within an inch of his life.
The dance ended and Beatrice chose an opportune moment to slip behind the wall of potted ferns in front of the glass doors that led to the gardens, one of her favorite hiding places as a young girl.
He began making his way toward her hiding place, hoping to finally be able to seize a moment alone with her, when his mother pounced.
“There you are, Thorndon.” Her round face wreathed into a hopeful smile as she slipped her hand into the crook of his arm. “I have a lady to introduce—MissWilhelmina Penny, Sir Malcolm Penny’s niece.”
“I’m afraid that I’m rather exhausted from my—” he began, but his mother blithely ignored him.
“MissPenny is a lovely young thing, raisedentirelyin the countryside. She has such a charming, rustic air. She’s very good with bookkeeping and estate management, and her great-aunt tells me that she has a fascination with agricultural pursuits.”
Of course she did.
His mother rose to her tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “I think she could be the one.”
Drew cleared his throat. “I truly am tired from—”
“No refusals.” His mother tugged him toward MissPenny and her black-garbed pirate ship of an elderly chaperone. “She would be devastated. Just look at that angelic face.”
Yet another fair-haired wisp of a lady encased in frothy white. MissPenny looked as though a stiff breeze could carry her away. A duke’s refusal to dance with her might crush her entirely. Her name rang a bell, though he couldn’t recall why.
“One more, Mother, and then I’m finished for the evening.”
Moments later he clasped a tiny-boned wrist. “MissPenny, may I have the pleasure?”
A panicked expression crossed her pretty face but then she smiled one of those sugar-spun smiles that would melt so quickly outside the comforts of London. “Your Grace, the pleasure would be mine.”
