Page 3 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Are you running away?” A voice came from behind her, high-pitched and clear and entirely unexpected.

Alice dropped the bag. It hit the cobbles with a dull thud that seemed to echo in the confined space of the service yard.

She turned. A child stood watching her, his head tilted. Brown hair in wild disarray, Sunday-best clothes rumpled beyond redemption, and eyes that held an intelligence far too sharp for a boy who could not have been more than seven.

“You’re the Duke’s son,” she said, because it was the only thing her startled mind could produce.

She had seen him at the church. Both of them, nearly identical and unmistakable, causing the kind of mischief that only children at formal events could achieve.

“Frederick. Your father will be looking for you.”

“Freddie,” the boy corrected, with the air of someone who had endured this misunderstanding many times and found it tedious. “And probably. But I wanted to know where you were going. You left the church secretly. I saw you.”

Alice’s heart performed a complicated maneuver. “You followed me?”

Freddie shrugged, a gesture of such elaborate casualness that it could only have been learned from an adult. “You were sneaking away. Adults don’t do that.”

“And how is it that you came to follow me?”

He shrugged rather easily. Too easily, in fact. His lips stretched into a grin. “It was easy.”

Alice looked at him, and he looked back.

“I would like it,” she urged, “if you explained what it was that you did that was so easy.”

He grinned again, as though he had been waiting to be asked about his mischief.

“I saw the carriage standing there,” he explained. “And I saw you looking very sneaky for an adult, and while you were talking to the driver, I snuck onto the back. See? Easy.”

Alice closed her eyes and counted to three before speaking.

“Your father will be worried,” she said, gentling her voice into the tone she used with skittish horses and frightened housemaids. “We should get you back to the carriage. The wedding will be starting soon, and⁠—”

“No, it won’t.”

The voice that interrupted did not belong to the child. It came from the gateway to the street, low, controlled, and carrying an edge that turned the spring air sharp as a blade.

Alice looked up.

The Duke of Bearmoor stood in the arched entrance to the service yard, and the word that came to her—the only word, inappropriate and unbidden—was magnificent.

She had seen him once before today, during his only visit to Peltbury House. A formal introduction in the drawing room, Rachel blushing prettily beside their father, Alice hovering at the periphery where she belonged. He had been handsome then, in the remote way of portraits and statues, a man constructed of good breeding and correct angles.

But distance and propriety had obscured the quality of him that was now impossible to ignore: the sheer physical presence of a man who occupied space as though he had been granted exclusive rights to it.

Up close, he was something else entirely. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a jaw that looked carved from something that would break lesser tools. His eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made the bag in her hand feel suddenly irrelevant.

“Your Grace! Your son followed me,” Alice said, because someone had to speak, and the Duke appeared to be engaged in the silent work of gathering his composure. “I never realized until now…”

“Explain to me,” the Duke demanded, each word measured with the care of a man placing explosives, “why my seven-year-old son is standing in your service yard, when he should be at the church watching his father get married.”

“I had no idea he came along, Your Grace,” Alice replied. “I didn’t know he was there. I would have returned him immediately if⁠—”

“She didn’t do anything wrong,” Freddie interjected. “I followed her because she…” He hesitated. “Because she got into the carriage and I was bored!”

The Duke’s gaze did not waver from Alice’s face for a few seconds. When at last he spoke, it was not to her. His eyes flickered downward.

“Frederick!”