Page 45 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“I want to kiss you,” he said. “But I shall not mistake wanting it for permission.”

She remained where she was. For one suspended moment he thought she might close the distance herself.

Instead, she drew a slow breath and stepped back.

“You are a very strange man, Your Grace.”

“I have been called worse.”

“I have known men who would have taken the kiss and afterwards persuaded themselves that I had invited it.”

“I will not.”

“No.” She held his gaze. “I believe you.”

The trust in those three words cost him more restraint than doubt would have done.

“If there is ever to be such a moment,” he said, “the choice will be yours as much as mine.”

Selina took another step back, and the shadows reclaimed her face.

“Good night, Your Grace.”

“Good night.”

He did not say her name.

She left him among the covered orange trees. Nathaniel remained there until the cold compelled him to follow.

***

Friday came.

The morning papers arrived with the coffee. Nathaniel read each one from the first column to the last, then sent a footman to obtain the cheaper sheets Wexford House did not ordinarily admit. They contained a countess’s gaming debts, a bishop’s coachman and an actress at Drury Lane, but nothing about Georgiana or her letters.

Selina entered while he was examining the final page. She looked at the papers spread across the table, pulled out a chair and reached for the nearest sheet.

Nathaniel let her read.

When she reached the end, she turned it over, found the reverse blank and laid it down.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing.”

Georgiana received the news with a relief too great to disturb. Nathaniel did not tell her that Rowland’s silence might signify delay rather than surrender. For that morning, it was enough that her name had not appeared.

By evening, however, relief had given way to uncertainty.

Nathaniel and Selina sat in the library with the discarded sheets between them.

“Perhaps he was bluffing,” Nathaniel said.

“Perhaps.”

“You do not believe it.”

“I do not know what to believe.” Selina smoothed the edge of one paper. “He demanded eleven hundred pounds and received no answer. He ordered Georgiana to meet him again, and again she did not. Yet the day upon which he promised to publish has nearly passed, and he has done nothing.”