Page 3 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

She looked up.

“Sit, child. You are standing there like a prisoner before the assizes.”

Ophelia sat in the room’s one hard chair and forced her hands to release their grip on each other. “I am sorry. I have brought this down on you. If I had not come…”

“If you had not come, you would be married to that creature by now.” The words were sharp, but her eyes were kind. “We will have none of that. You came because your mother told you to come to me if you ever had need, and your mother was the dearest friend I ever had. I would not undo it for the world.”

Elise pressed her thin lips together, shaking her head slowly. “But I will not pretend to you, Ophelia. You are not a fool, and I will never insult you by treating you as one. My nephew is a problem.”

“He need not be.” Her voice came out level and quiet: the counting-house voice, the one she used when she found errors in her father’s books the clerks had missed. People took her seriously when she used that voice, instead of the small soft one she used when she wanted to be ignored. “He has no reason to look at me twice, and I shall give him none. In a few weeks the snow will go, and he will go with it. Until then, I shall employ the one accomplishment my father never knew he taught me. I shall be so dull as to be invisible.”

For a moment Elise looked at her with something close to grief, as though she saw the mother in the daughter’s face.

“You have a great many accomplishments, Ophelia.” She reached over and briefly covered Ophelia’s hand with her own dry, warm one. “I wish that were not among them.”

“It may protect me now.”

“It may.” Elise withdrew her hand. “Very well. You will be Miss Jones, he will be bored, and the snow will melt soon enough. But do not mistake Adrian for Markham. There is not a cruel bone in his whole idle body.”

“Then I have nothing to fear from him.”

“Cruel men are easier to guard against. They are generally obliging enough to show you where to stand.”

Ophelia studied her godmother’s face. “What are you warning me against?”

“I wish I knew.” Elise rose, smoothing her skirts. “Adrian means no harm. Neither did my brother. Men like them can cause a surprising amount of it all the same.”

It was no answer, but Ophelia could not doubt the concern behind it. She nodded. Elise gave a small smile that reassured neither of them.

“Now go to sleep,” Elise said. “We have a duke to bore to flinders in the morning.”

She bent and kissed Ophelia’s forehead, a thing she did rarely and which undid Ophelia more thoroughly than any warning could have. Then she went out, taking the worst of the chill in the room with her.

Ophelia did not sleep for a long time.

She lay in the dark and listened to the house settle: the old timbers ticking as the cold worked into them, the wind feeling its way along the corridors. Somewhere below, in a better room than hers, the duke was sleeping, or lying awake and wondering what his aunt had tried to hide from him.

Men like Calder did not need to be cruel. They had only to become interested. Once they did, doors opened, servants answered questions, and other people’s secrets became theirs for the asking. He had already looked at Ophelia with surprise. Tomorrow surprise might become curiosity, and a duke’s curiosity was not a small thing to the person caught beneath it.

She thought of the way he had looked at her on the stairs. His had not been one of the calculating looks she knew. He had been caught unprepared, but curiosity had followed the surprise quickly enough.

Forgive me. I have arrived like an avalanche.

He had said it to put her at her ease. He had bowed to her, a duke to a woman dressed like a governess, as though it cost him nothing.

Perhaps it had cost him nothing. Kindness came easily to those who had always received it.

She turned onto her side, drew up her knees, and found beneath her pillow the hard, familiar shape of the book, its leather corners worn soft by years of handling. Her mother’s book. She did not need to open it to see the inscription on the flyleaf: For my dear Ophelia.

She kept it close every night. It was the one thing she knew she would never be able to sell, though the money might buy another week of safety. Some things were beyond price.

Cruel men are easier to guard against.

Ophelia thought she could guard against Adrian Sutton. She had walked away on her wedding morning knowing Crispin Markham’s rage would follow her, crossed England and deep into Wales by slow and crooked stages, and arrived at a stranger’s door with only the hope that her mother had been right, that Elise would take her in without question. She could survive a few weeks in the company of a charming man.

She fell asleep at last telling herself so, one hand resting on her mother’s book. Her final waking thought, treacherous and unbidden, was that Adrian had a kind face, and that it was a great pity that she must make sure never to look at it again.

Chapter Three