Page 98 of A Mother for the Blind Duke’s Orphans

Hector kept himself still as he listened.

“Her eyes are blue,” Jasper continued. “A clear blue. Not the pale or dull kind. When she looks at someone, she looks as though she is actually listening, which is rare in a woman nowadays.”

“I know the color of my wife’s eyes.” He gritted.

“Do you know how they change when she smiles?” Jasper retorted.

Hector’s jaw set.

“They narrow slightly,” Jasper continued. “In a warm sort of way, and her entire face participates. Some beauties smile only with the mouth, but your duchess does not. Her cheeks lift, and there is a small line here—” Hector slapped his hand away as Jasper tried to indicate by pointing at his face. “Beside the mouth. It is very slight, and it appears and vanishes.”

Hector wished, with sudden violence, that Jasper would stop. He wished more fiercely that he would not.

The music continued, and Poppy moved through it somewhere beyond him, slender and bright and indistinct. Hector could see color when the light permitted, and it remained long enough for him to make meaning of it. But he could not see the small line beside her mouth. He could not know how her smile altered her eyes. He could not gather the features of her face into certainty.

His own wife remained, in some essential way, unknown to him.

“She is of medium height,” Jasper said, quieter now. “Slender. Graceful without appearing aware of it. Her face is not the sort one forgets. There is patience in it, which is not the same as softness. And when she glances this way, as she has done three times in as many minutes, she looks…”

He paused.

Hector turned toward him. “She has looked this way?”

Jasper’s smile was audible. “Ah.”

“Answer me.”

“Yes. Frequently enough to make your refusal to dance in the comfort of your own home even more idiotic.”

Hector looked back toward the moving blur of dancing bodies. “What did you mean, she looks like what?”

“Like a woman waiting for her husband to stop punishing himself.” Jasper sounded exasperated.

“You just met her. You do not know her.” Hector gritted his teeth.

“No,” Jasper said. “But I know you. And I know longing when it stands beside me pretending to be moral restraint.”

Hector’s throat felt tight. The cane under his hand was solid and familiar, in a way people rarely were. Taking it away from him would unbalance him. He found it funny that he felt the same way when Leander took Poppy away from him.

“I made her a promise,” he said.

“What promise?” Jasper asked curiously.

“That I would not demand what she did not offer.”

“Dancing with your wife is a demand?”

Hector hated that he asked in such a sarcastic way.

“It is not a trivial request.”

“No,” Jasper agreed. “But if you long to see all of her, then perhaps you should ask her if you could touch her face?”

Hector froze at that. He had never thought of it before. “That is an intimate request.”

Jasper laughed. “Fortunate, then, that you are married.”

Hector gave a sharp breath that was nearly a laugh and nearly a cough. “I cannot simply ask her if I may touch her face so that I can see it better.”