For Four Seasons, She Sat Alone and Unclaimed at Every Ball—Until the Duke Crossed the Crowded Room, Leaned Close, and Whispered, “Act as Though You’re Mine,” Unaware Their Carefully Staged Lie Was About to Become Real

PART 2 

The supper dance, when it came, was quieter than the first — fewer eyes upon them by then, the ballroom having exhausted its first appetite for astonishment and settled into speculation instead. It was there, moving through the figures with rather less formality than the earlier dance had allowed, that Friedwide first mentioned her brother — not by design, but because the Duke had asked, with what seemed genuine curiosity, whether she had family beyond her aunt and cousin.

“A brother. Peter. Twelve years old, and cleverer than anyone in our family has quite known what to do with.” She had not meant to say more, but something in the ease of the conversation loosened her tongue. “His schooling is paid through the coming year. After that, I do not entirely know what becomes of him.”

Cadwallan said nothing further on the subject that evening. But he did not forget it either.

He bowed over her hand with a correctness that somehow felt, after everything he had just said across two dances, like its own kind of intimacy. And Friedwide was aware of eyes upon her — dozens of them, curious, calculating, several openly hostile — in a way she had never once experienced in four seasons of being invisible.

“I should require time to consider,” she said, because pride demanded she not appear too eager, even now with her heart beating hard and strange against her stays.

“Of course.” He straightened, and the mask he had briefly set aside settled back over his features — cool and remote, the Winter Duke once more. “I will call upon your aunt tomorrow. You may give me your answer then.”

He paused, and something flickered in his dark eyes that she could not name — not quite warmth, not quite calculation. Something uneasy between the two.

“For what it is worth, Miss Neville — Lady Marberry was wrong. You are not unclaimed for want of merit. The world is simply slow to look where it ought.”

He left her there at the edge of the floor with her pulse unsteady and her mind in disarray. Friedwide watched him go, aware of Cresia already bearing down upon her with a hundred urgent questions, aware of the whispers rising around her like a tide finally noticing the shore it had long ignored. And she thought, with a strange, treacherous flutter beneath her borrowed calm, that whatever answer she gave him tomorrow, tonight she had for the first time in four long seasons been seen.

She did not yet understand what it would cost her. She understood only that she wanted quite desperately to be asked again.

He called upon Kellett House on Keane Street at eleven the following morning. His grandmother, the Dowager Duchess, had already received word — as had half of Mayfair — that the Duke of Winerth had danced not once but twice with Miss Neville. The matrons of London were already sharpening their theories. Cadwallan was aware of all of this. He did not care.

“Might we walk in the garden, Mrs. Kellett?” he asked, and Friedwide’s aunt agreed with such alacrity that he suspected she would have agreed to considerably stranger requests, so long as they involved a duke and her niece in proximity.