Page 32 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Yet she was aware of it with an uncomfortable clarity. Every whisper seemed to sharpen the sensation of that gloved hand resting lightly against her, as though the room watched not only her humiliation but his reaction to it.

He guided her away before any one knot of talkers could become a scene, and Ellen understood without being told that he had heard every word. Her jaw set against it. She could not decide which would be worse, for him to acknowledge the insults or to ignore them altogether.

He did neither.

He would no more remark upon them than he would remark upon the heat of the candles, and she could not tell whether that was kindness, discipline, contempt, or the simple fact that such words could not touch a man who had long ago made himself unreachable.

At the doorway to the second room, a worse whisper found her.

“And there was an officer last Season,” a woman said, her amusement soft and sharp together. “Before the ruin.”

Another voice asked, with delighted interest, “Was there indeed?”

“A Lieutenant Vance. Quite the little flirt, that one. She was half-promised, people said, until the money went and he remembered he had somewhere else to be.”

For one dreadful instant the noise of the room seemed to recede, and she was conscious of nothing but Theodore beside her, the people around them, and the listening ears waiting to see whether the duke’s purchased bride would blush.

Ellen’s step did not falter.

It cost her something it had not cost her before, and she paid it. Her chin remained where Augusta had set it.

Beside her, Theodore’s hand shifted once against her back, so slight a movement that no one else could have seen it.

She did not know whether he meant to steady her or move her on.

Perhaps he did not know either.

In the second hour, as they approached the card room, a man came toward them through the crowd, and Ellen felt the change in her husband before she saw the cause of it.

Nothing obvious altered. His hand at her back did not move, his stride did not break, his face kept the same severe arrangement it had worn all evening. Yet the quality of his stillness changed. It was no longer the easy stillness of a man who owned every room he entered. It became something held in check, something braced behind polished manners.

Ellen had spent three weeks learning the small weather of him, because she had little else to study in a matrimony made of flowers, closed doors, and silence. She noticed the change at once.

“Your Grace,” she said softly, without looking at him, “is something amiss?”

“No.”

The answer came too quickly for a man who usually took his time with words.

She glanced ahead. “Then something is unwelcome.”

His gaze did not leave the approaching gentleman. “That is not the same thing.”

The man was tall and silver-haired, dressed with the particular care of someone who intends to be looked at and wishes the looking to seem accidental. He bowed. The bow was a study in itself, low enough to satisfy the strictest eye and still a half-degree shallow of warmth.

“Rosanne,” he said. “And the new duchess.”

His voice was warm.

His eyes, resting on Theodore, were not.

“You are to be congratulated,” he continued, turning the warmth upon Ellen with such skill that she trusted it even less. “The whole of the ton is occupied with the business. I have heard your matrimony discussed in three separate drawing rooms this week, which is two more than my own ever managed to provoke.”

Theodore inclined his head. “You are kind to keep count.”

“I keep count of a great many things.”

“I have never doubted it.”