Page 18 of His Duchess to Remember

He began to walk off, intending to go directly to the dining room. If he could remember where it was.

The butler ran to catch up to him. “Are you attending dinner like that, Your Grace?”

Malcolm stopped. “What do ye mean?”

“Will you not change first?”

Malcolm glanced down at himself. His clothes had been freshly laundered, and clean when he put them on this morning: a simple shirt and his favored kilt. He could not smell any unpleasantness, just the scent of soap from the bath he had enjoyed at dawn. To his mind, he looked and smelled perfectly presentable.

“Why would I change?” he asked.

The butler hesitated, chewing his lip in consternation. “It is… not necessary, of course, but it’s usually expected.”

“I’m not a guest in a stranger’s house,” Malcolm said with a shake of his head. “This isn’t a dinner party where I need to consider a thousand stupid rules and follow some manner of complicated etiquette. She’s my wife, and we’re having dinner together. What I’m wearing is fine.”

A prickle of cold sweat slipped under his collar as he continued walking in the direction of the dining room, for when it became clear that he had lost a decade of his life, he had lost every memory of that decade. Not just names and faces and relationships and the fact he was married with a son, but all of the training he had received when he inherited his dukedom.

I can’t show that I’m an impostor.

He swallowed uncomfortably, realizing that dinner might not be as simple as he thought.

Octavia was already partaking in the first course when he entered the dining room, her spoon pausing in the lurid green soup before her.

She seemed surprised to see him, her blue eyes—the color of dusky summer skies—widening. “Your Grace?”

“The butler said ye wished to dine together,” Malcolm replied, though he was beginning to think that was not so true.

She put on a tight smile. “Oh, well… certainly. Please, sit.” She glanced at a nearby footman. “Might you set a place for His Grace?”

The footman bowed his head and rushed to comply, while Malcolm walked the length of the long dining table and pulled out the chair closest to his wife.

He sat down. “Have I kept ye waiting? I fell asleep in the library.”

“Yes, Dr. Stanforth said you might be tired after overexerting yourself,” Octavia replied flatly. “How is your head?”

“Fine. It’s my mind that’s injured.”

She nodded. “I am aware.” She lifted the spoon to her mouth, hesitated, and set it back into the green soup. “I just noticed you had a bruise, that is all.”

“The worst of it is under my hair,” he explained, feeling incredibly uncomfortable.

Is this why they lived separately? Because they had nothing to say to one another? He had been informed by the doctor that he and Octavia had been married for five years, so was it boredom and a lack of common ground that had forced them apart? Had the novelty of marriage worn off that quickly?

“Looked like I was smuggling a goose egg on the side of my head for days,” he added with a stiff chuckle. “It has gone down now, though.”

She, however, did not laugh; she did not even look up from her soup.

He was spared a few minutes of awkwardness by the return of the footman, who set down a place for Malcolm, while another servant rested a matching bowl of green soup in front of him. In fairness, it smelled better than it looked, aromas of onion and thyme making his mouth water.

He grabbed a spoon and tried to scoop some soup onto it, but the bowl was so shallow that only a little bit found its way onto the spoon. Annoyed, he tilted the bowl up and scooped up a proper amount, lifting it to his lips.

It was only as he swallowed that he noticed Octavia staring at him in something like shock.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She blinked. “You are not supposed to do that. You are supposed to take small amounts, like this…”

She demonstrated, daintily sliding her spoon through the watercress soup.