Page 34 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Theodore steadied her at once.

He did not turn his head. He did not ask what she had seen, and he did not draw attention to the sudden pressure of her fingers against his arm. He merely firmed beneath her grasp, small and controlled, the sort of movement no one else would notice, and somehow the floor came back under her feet.

The officer at the far side of the room shifted.

Ellen held her breath.

Then his profile showed, and the cruel little hope ended as quickly as it had risen.

It was not Vance.

It was a stranger, only a stranger, a man who resembled him from behind and only to a woman who wanted, desperately and foolishly, to be wrong.

Ellen released Theodore’s sleeve at once, her gloved fingers curling back into her palm as if she might hide the evidence of having reached for him. “Forgive me,” she said quietly.

Theodore kept his gaze fixed on the room. “There is nothing to forgive.”

“I thought I saw someone,” she said, attempting to restore her voice to the calm Augusta had pressed into her earlier along with the pins.

“I am fully aware.”

The answer was too quiet.

Ellen looked up at him, startled despite herself. His expression remained directed toward the company before them, his posture unchanged, his hand still a steady guard at her back.

“You know?” she asked.

Theodore’s eyes moved briefly over the crowd before returning to the same fixed point. “My powers of observation are not yet failed, Your Grace.”

There was no cruelty in the words. That made them worse somehow, because cruelty could have been resisted, while this careful, indifferent accuracy left her with nothing to answer except the truth of it.

Ellen lowered her gaze. “Then I hope you are also discreet.”

His hand did not move from her back. “Always.”

“That must be convenient,” she said, arranging her face before anyone nearby could find satisfaction in its disorder.

“Often,” Theodore replied, his tone so even that she could not tell whether he meant to end the subject or spare her from it.

She might have laughed in another life, or another matrimony, or another room. In this one, she only drew a careful breath, settled her hand more lightly on his arm, and put her chin back where Augusta had placed it.

She survived the rest of the evening on pride, which was the one fund she had not allowed to run dry.

Near midnight, after another quarter hour of candles, murmurs, and faces she could no longer bear to sort into names, Theodore bent his head slightly toward her. “We are going.”

Ellen looked up, relief moving through her before caution could conceal it. “Now?”

“Yes.”

She searched his face, though she knew by then that his face rarely gave what one asked of it. “Has something transpired?”

“Enough has happened,” he said.

It was not comfort. It was not explanation. Still, the words loosened something inside her, and she could not deny the relief that came with permission to stop enduring the room.

She nodded. “Then I am ready.”

Augusta joined them near the entrance hall, her eyes moving at once from Theodore’s face to Ellen’s, and whatever she found there made her mouth tighten. “Leaving so soon?”