Page 4 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

Gone was the bravado the boy had demonstrated, though his eyes hardened after a brief flicker of vulnerability. “Yes, Father?”

“Explain to me,” the Duke spoke, his voice ice-cold, “why you were running around wildly on my wedding day.”

The boy hesitated, and Alice felt the strange urge to speak for him. However, one look at the Duke dissuaded her.

“You see, Papa…” The boy shifted. “It’s like this. Miss Leyton wasn’t watching and I got bored, and I saw the carriage and nothing was happening anyway, so I thought I would just greet the horses outside, but then I saw this lady and wondered where she was going, and…”

He said it all in one breath, and Alice lowered her head to hide the smile threatening to pull at her lips.

“And you, My Lady?” The Duke turned to her, and her head snapped up. “You were sneaking away with my son in the back of your carriage?”

Before Alice could formulate a response, the clatter of hooves and wheels announced another arrival.

A carriage pulled up at the front of the house. It was her father’s carriage, the crest visible on the door.

Donald Haraway, the Earl of Peltbury, descended hurriedly. He did not notice them immediately. Alice watched as he turned to the footman who had jumped down beside him and spoke in a low, urgent hiss that carried nonetheless into the quiet yard.

“Find Rachel. Immediately. Check her chambers, the garden, the… everywhere. She must be somewhere. We can’t have lost a grown woman!”

The footman nodded and hurried into the house.

Her father turned and froze. Then, his face performed a series of adjustments that Alice could have cataloged for a study on the physical manifestations of dread.

“Y-Your Grace,” he said, recovering quickly. “This is… I assure you, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for⁠—”

“Where,” the Duke asked icily, “is Lady Rachel?”

Her father’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Alice watched the calculations visibly ticking behind his eyes as he weighed options, consequences, the precise calibration of humiliation.

“Your Grace, if we might step inside…”

“No.” The single syllable landed like a door slamming. The Duke turned to his driver, who had remained at a discreet distance with the carriage. “Take my son inside. Keep the door closed, and for heaven’s sake, do not let him out of your sight.”

“But Father, I don’t want to go, I want to…”

The protest was ignored.

The carriage door closed with a definitive click, leaving the three adults in the service yard with the spring sunshine and the weight of whatever came next.

“Lord Peltbury,” the Duke said. His voice had dropped another octave, into territory that Alice suspected few men ever heard and fewer still emerged from unchanged. “I’m going to ask one last time: where is your daughter?”

Lord Peltbury looked at Alice. For one bizarre moment, she thought he might attempt to deflect, to suggest that the wrong daughter had been the subject all along, that the Duke had confused his intended bride with the sister no one remembered.

The moment passed. Something in his face settled into the exhausted acceptance of a man who had run out of lies.

“Gone,” he said. The word emerged flat and stripped of ornament, the first honest thing Alice had heard from him in years. “Rachel is gone. And I do not know where.”

Chapter Two

“Rachel is missing?” Her voice sounded foreign to her own ears, thin and strained. “She can’t be missing. She was preparing for her wedding this morning. I saw her.”

Alice stared at her father. The word gone hung between them like a blade, and she could feel its edge against her skin.

Her father dragged a hand down his face. “I know what I saw, Alice. She asked for a moment alone in her chamber before we departed. I granted it. When the carriage was brought around, she was not in her room. Not in the house. Not anywhere I could find her.”

“Did you check the garden? The glasshouse? She used to sit there when she was⁠—”

“Everywhere,” he cut her off sharply. “The footmen have searched the grounds. The maids have turned her chambers inside out. There is no sign of her.”