Page 2 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

“A goddaughter? You have a goddaughter. In all my life you have never once mentioned a goddaughter, and you tell me everything, Aunt; you tell me things I had infinitely rather not know.”

“Sir Rhys had a great many connexions from his India years.” Elise turned towards the fire, giving him her profile and the set line of her shoulders. She took up the poker and did something unnecessary to the fire. “She is shy, and she has had a hard time of it, and she is under my protection. I will ask you to leave her be.”

“Leave her be?” The warning was plain, and it caught him under the ribs, unjustified as he was certain it was. “Aunt Elise, you wound me. When have I ever not left a respectable young woman scrupulously be?”

“You are a duke, and you have your father’s face, and your father could not enter a room without half the women in it deciding to be unhappy over him. I know you mean no harm. I am telling you that there is harm to be done here that you cannot see, and so I am asking you to do nothing at all.” She set the poker down and looked at him fully. For an instant the sharpness drained out of her and left a tired woman past fifty who had not been sleeping well. “Can you do that for me? Nothing at all? You are so very good at it.”

It was an old joke between them, Adrian who never does anything, but it landed wrong, and he did not laugh.

“Yes,” he said instead, more soberly than he had said anything in months. “If you wish it. Of course.”

“I wish it.”

Above them, faintly, a door closed.

Adrian stood in the warm hall of his only sanctuary, the snow ticking against the deep-set windows, and took inventory. His aunt was lying to him. She had never lied to him in his life. A goddaughter who flinched from a duke, a welcome cold as the blizzard, and a whole house holding its breath. He had come through the storm expecting peace and found instead a locked door with two frightened women behind it.

Whatever Elise feared, she feared it in earnest, and he had never known his aunt to be afraid of anything. Miss Jones had looked at him as though she expected someone else, as though she expected to be hunted, and he could not dismiss that as shyness merely because his aunt wished him to.

A wiser man might have heeded the warning, yet Elise had never lied to him, and he had never known her to be afraid. He very much did not like to think that there was something his aunt might have to fear, and in that moment, he decided that he quite simply could not allow whatever had frightened her to continue to exist. He could leave Miss Jones entirely alone, as promised, and still discover what had put that look on his aunt’s face. And then take steps to ensure it troubled her no more.

The distinction was narrow, but concern for Elise widened it sufficiently for his purposes.

“Well.” He smiled at his aunt, meaning the smile to reassure her, and watched it do the opposite. “I am snowed in with a secret. What a very merry Christmas this is going to be.”

Elise Maddox closed her eyes a moment, like a woman who had heard a stone come loose far up the mountain and knew there was nothing now to do but wait for the landslide that would follow it down.

Chapter Two

She did not stop until she had reached her room, shut the door, and set her back against it, as if the plain deal panel could keep out what had just walked into the house.

A duke. A London duke, with a quick crooked smile and a coat cut on Bond Street and the arrogant ease of a man who had never been made to wait for anything. Ophelia James pressed her cold hands flat to the door, felt the grain of old oak rough beneath her palms, and made herself breathe slowly, the way her mother had taught her.

Slowly, my heart. Fear is only breath that has forgotten its manners.

She had been so careful. Three weeks of being no one. Three weeks of Miss Olivia Jones, the dead baronet’s orphaned goddaughter, so quiet and grateful for her place that the eye slid over her and found nothing to catch on. She had learned the trick long ago: make yourself small, unremarkable, easy to overlook.

The trick had worked perfectly at Plas Eira. Even the sharp-eyed maid Bronwen, who brought her chocolate in the mornings and chattered of Welsh saints and local gossip, had said only once, sidelong, You’re no more a poor relation than I’m the Queen of Sheba, miss, but it’s none of my business and I’ll thank the good Lord for the company.

Now the one corner of the kingdom Ophelia had judged too remote for the Ton had produced a duke out of a blizzard.

She knew Adrian Sutton by name, of course. Everyone knew the Duke of Calder, and Elise had spoken of her nephew often enough. She had never set eyes on him before tonight, but his kind she recognised at a glance: an idle gentleman of the ton. She had spent the whole of the Season before her flight being paraded through drawing rooms crowded with charming younger sons and indebted barons, the occasional viscount too bored to hide his calculations. Every one had looked at her and seen, just behind her face, the long bright columns of her father’s ledgers.

The James fortune.

They smiled, charmed her father, and positioned themselves near enough to take whatever he might be persuaded to give them. And then Crispin Markham had taught her most thoroughly what such charm concealed.

Even here, even unspoken, his name felt like a cold finger on the back of her neck.

She pushed away from the door and crossed to the window, leaning into the deep alcove to peer through the tiny leaded panes, the cold of the glass reaching her skin before she had even touched it. The snow had not slackened. It came down outside the glass, endless and indifferent, and she found she was glad of it. Let it bury the lanes and seal the passes. The snow trapped the duke, and a man who could not leave could carry no word of her to London. Even if he somehow identified her, she would have time to make new plans and disappear before the news reached anyone who mattered.

Her panic subsided by degrees, and only then did she allow herself to consider that flight might not be necessary. Calder was dangerous only if he learned who she was, and he would not learn it. There was only Olivia Jones, who would be so dull that His Grace soon ceased to wonder about her.

An hour passed. Bronwen brought her supper on a tray, a bowl of hearty mutton stew and buttered bread, and Ophelia was careful not to meet the maid’s inquisitive expression. The household must be in a ferment over the duke’s unexpected arrival, and Bronwen plainly wondered why Ophelia was hiding while everyone else hastened to attend him.

She tasted little of her supper, changed for bed, and listened as the servants carried water and bustled about in the hallways. The house quieted by degrees. She had nearly steadied herself when a soft knock came and Lady Elise let herself in without waiting. Ophelia shot to her feet, wringing her hands together so tightly her knuckles creaked.

“He has gone to bed, or is pretending to have done.” Elise sat on the edge of the narrow mattress with a sigh that seemed to come up from her boots. “He drove through the pass, the great fool. He might have died, and then I should have had a dead duke to explain as well as a live runaway. One disaster at a time is all I ask.”