Page 5 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

Silence settled over the table.

Miss Pettibone, who had followed perhaps one word in three, beamed at them.

“Such a sweet girl. I always say weddings are best avoided in winter. Churches are so draughty.”

“Pettibone,” said Elise, in a voice that closed the subject.

The old lady subsided happily into her syllabub.

Adrian sat looking at the door.

Their reactions to his story had told him a great deal, and those unexpected reactions were making him reconsider all of the things about Miss Jones that had seemed strange to him thus far. A goddaughter he had never heard of before. A young woman dressed as a dependent who managed the house as though she had been born to it. A vanished heiress, and a spoon striking the floor at the sound of Markham’s name.

To be so frightened of a marriage that one would rather be ruined than wed.

She had risen white and shaking to defend the woman every drawing room in London laughed at, as though the ruin he had paraded for sport were her own.

The thought arrived whole, the way Plas Eira had appeared out of the snow, all at once and impossible to take back.

“Aunt,” he said slowly.

She looked up and saw the question forming. He watched her understand, too late, that there was nothing she could do to prevent it.

“Who is she?”

“She is my goddaughter. I have told you.” The words came too quick, tumbling over each other, said in a hard voice he had never heard Elise use before. Under the steel of it was a plea.

Leave it. For my sake, leave it.

At the door she had said the goddaughter of my late husband. Sir Rhys had since dropped out of the account altogether. Adrian noticed, because he always noticed, and for once wished he did not.

He thought of his promise, made only the night before. Nothing at all. You are so very good at it. The right thing was also the easiest: accept her answer and ask nothing more of it, then let the thaw carry him back to London having disturbed no one and carried no weight.

“Of course,” he said. “Forgive me. I have had too much of your dreadful apple brandy and am inventing mysteries to amuse myself.”

He smiled, and saw that she did not believe him.

“Olivia Jones. Your goddaughter. I shall remember.”

The lie came lightly, but the truth was there now, he was quite certain of it, and he could not leave the matter alone. Whether from concern, curiosity, or some unholy marriage of the two, he needed to know what had driven Ophelia James across the kingdom and into his aunt’s protection.

Chapter Four

In the days after the dinner, Ophelia returned to her craft with the devotion of a woman whose life depended upon it, which it did.

Being no one was an art, and she was its mistress. One should always sit where the light was poor. Speak quietly, only if asked a question, and answer questions with the weather, and if pressed beyond the weather, the state of the roads. Wear grey. Be useful enough to be welcome but never become indispensable, for the indispensable were noticed and the idle wondered at. She had walked the narrow path between them for years.

The difficulty was that the Duke of Calder had decided to be everywhere.

He did not pursue her openly. That she could have weathered; a woman could arrange herself against obvious pursuit. He did something far worse. He was amiably, unrelentingly present. If she sat down to mend linen, he was in the window-seat with a book he would stop reading to strike up conversation. If she went to the stillroom, he declared a sudden interest in cordials. When the snow eased briefly and she went outside to walk the cleared paths for air, her breath a small grey cloud ahead of her, he was already there by the holly hedge, falling into step beside her with the ease of a man who had never once imagined himself unwelcome.

He asked nothing dangerous. He asked about candle-making and the salting of beef and whether the river froze solid enough to walk on. Then he attended to her answers, dull as she made them, as though they were news from Paris.

None of it made sense, and it made her more wary than if he had attempted to interrogate her.

No one listened to dull answers. A woman who spoke only of the weather ceased to be heard within an hour. Yet the duke took her dullest coin and turned it over like a collector, leaving her bewildered and befuddled.

“Likely to continue,” he repeated. “You say that with such a confident air. I shall hope you are wrong and suspect you are right. Bronwen tells me you knew the hens would stop laying a full day before they did.”