Page 54 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Who was it?” His voice had dropped: flat, precise, stripped of all social veneer.

Alice finally looked up at him. He stood very still, his hands hanging at his sides, his expression calm. But his eyes moved over her face with a care that suggested he was reading something she had not chosen to show him, and the observation tightened her chest.

“It is no matter,” she insisted.

“It matters very much.”

“Unkind people say unkind things. I am not a child. I know how to withstand it.”

“You were sitting alone behind a hedge at a garden party with your eyes closed.”

Alice rose from the bench. The motion brought her closer to him than she intended. She stepped to the side, smoothing her skirts with hands she ordered to be steady. “I was composing myself. There is a distinction.”

He moved, and before she had completed the turn, he was between her and the gap in the yew hedge, close enough that she would have to step around him to leave.

She stopped. “Move, please.”

“No.”

“Kenneth.”

“Tell me who upset you.”

The directive was quiet. She had learned, in the weeks at Bearmoor, that his voice never rose when he was most in earnest. The quieter he became, the more absolute the intent behind it.

She looked at him. The hard set of his jaw, the line of his shoulders, and the intensity in his eyes that she could not name, that she had been refusing to name since the night in the parlor and the carriage and every corridor between.

“They said nothing that isn’t said everywhere,” she told him. “That I don’t already know. I am the spare sister, the wrong choice, the woman of insufficient accomplishments and excessive proportions who somehow managed to—” She stopped. Her voice had thinned; she did not want it to thin. She took a deep breath and finished evenly, “It doesn’t require repeating. I would simply like to go back to the party.”

“You are not going back to the party.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Not like this.” He said it with a bluntness that silenced her. “Not with that on your face.”

“What is on my face?”

“Everything they put there.” His jaw worked once. “I will not have it.”

The absurdity of it rose in her chest alongside something she was not ready to examine. “I don’t need your permission to feel what I feel, Your Grace.”

“No. But I need you to hear something first.”

He stepped toward her. She did not step back. He stopped when the space between them was barely a hand’s width.

This close, she could see the faint creases at the corners of his eyes. She could see the color in them in the afternoon light, the brown that turned almost amber at the edges.

She had memorized his face without meaning to, the way one memorized the geography of a room one inhabited constantly.

“I called it a mistake,” he said. “In the carriage. I said it, and I watched you put a wall up around yourself that you have not taken down since, and I did not correct it. That was dishonest of me.”

Alice’s pulse jumped. “You needn’t do this.”

“I am speaking.” The words carried no sharpness.

He released a breath through his nose. The carefulness with which he always chose his words was still present, but the edges of it were different now. Less armored.

“It was not a mistake. What I felt was not a mistake.”