Every Lady Curtsied as the Duke Entered — But He Walked Straight to the Woman Reading Alone by the Window, Unaware She Was About to Become the Only Choice That Truly Mattered

PART 2

“Forgive me,” he said. “I have interrupted you.”

“You have,” she said. “Though I suspect you interrupt a great many things merely by entering a room. It can hardly be laid to your charge tonight.”

She glanced past his shoulder, then at the frozen tableau of the assembly. Something crossed her face — not fear, he thought, but a kind of weary recognition, as of a play whose every scene she had watched too often to be moved by it.

“They are all looking at us,” she observed. “You will have quite undone your reputation for good taste.”

“On the contrary,” said the Duke. “I begin to think I have only just discovered it.”

Her gaze came back to him — sharper now, reassessing. He had said it too plainly, and he knew it. He was a man accustomed to concealing his meaning behind a wall of cold courtesy, and he had just thrown a stone straight through his own wall.

But she did not simper. She did not blush. She did not look away.

She only closed her book — keeping her place, he noticed, with one finger between the pages, as though she fully intended to return to it the moment this odd interlude concluded — and studied him with the frank curiosity of a woman examining a specimen that had behaved unexpectedly.

“Sir,” she said, “you have the advantage of me. Half the room could name your tailor, your income, and your grandfather. I am afraid I have not the faintest idea who you are.”

Somewhere behind him, a woman made a small sound — half a gasp, quickly stifled.

He understood it. There could not have been three people in England who did not know his face. His name had opened this ball and stopped this room. And this plainly dressed young woman with the borrowed pearls and the mended sleeve had just confessed, without the smallest embarrassment, that she had no notion of him at all.

The Duke discovered that he was smiling. It felt unfamiliar on his mouth — like a language he had once spoken and forgotten.

“Kitpatrick,” he said. “Of Gaspre.”

He watched the name land. He had seen it land ten thousand times — the widening of the eyes, the quick recalculation, the sudden warmth flooding into faces that had been cool a moment before. He braced for it out of old habit.

It did not come.

She heard the name, and he saw her set it in its place in her mind with a small, precise nod — the way she might file a fact she had read and knew she would want later — and that was all. The temperature of her regard did not alter by a single degree.

“The Duke of Gaspre,” she repeated. “Then I have been rude to a very great man, and shall no doubt hear of it from my aunt for a fortnight.”

She did not look in the least sorry.

“Orwenna Kyniston,” she said, with a small, wry dip of her head. “I am here by the kindness of your Grace’s hostess. My uncle is Sir Halbert Pike. I am here as a favor to my cousins — to make up the numbers, and to mind the shawls.”

She said it without bitterness, as a plain accounting of her position, and returned her attention to him as though she had discharged the tedious formalities and was now free to be interested in the actual man.

“You had better sit down,” she added, “if you mean to go on standing there. You are casting a shadow on my page, and you are making the whole room forget how to breathe.”

He sat.

He was the Duke of Gaspre, master of forty thousand acres and a house so old the Conqueror had once dined in its hall. He had refused invitations from three princes and the correspondence of a queen. And he lowered himself onto the worn cushion of the window seat beside a baronet’s poor relation who had come to a ball to mind the shawls — and he did it as though nothing in the world had ever been more natural.

The murmur that swept the gallery at his back was like wind through a wheat field. He paid it no more heed than he would have paid the wind.