Page 61 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

Kenneth was watching her. She could feel it without turning her head, the particular quality of his attention, fixed and careful.

“You will continue, Carver,” he instructed. “Whatever resources you require.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

“Then that is all.”

Carver rose, collected his coat, and was gone in the manner of men whose usefulness depended on their capacity to disappear. The study door closed quietly after him.

Alice turned away from the window. She was aware of the room, the desk and the bookshelves and the familiar smell of cedar and ink that she now associated entirely with Kenneth.

An encouraging lead at last. A woman at an inn, three or four weeks ago, forty miles from Bath, who had played the pianoforte and was now elsewhere. Not Rachel, but a description of Rachel at a distance, already gone.

She pressed her palms flat against each other at her waist. The pressure helped. She was not going to do anything useless with her face in the study while Kenneth watched.

“It is something,” she said.

“It is.”

“She was not alone. That is something.”

“Alice.”

“It means she had help. She was not wandering—” She stopped and started again, quietly. “She was not wandering alone.”

Kenneth moved. Not toward her, but closer. The desk was still between them, and he stood on the far side of it with his hands at his sides. He looked at her with the expression that undid every prepared surface she assembled, the one that saw through the even voice and the steady hands and the straight spine, and arrived at what was underneath without asking permission to enter.

“I don’t know the man she is with,” she said. “But the landlord’s wife said separate rooms, which means—I think it means she is not in any danger. I think she is simply hiding, and when she is ready, she will…” She pressed her lips together, her eyes stinging. She absolutely was not going to cry. “Carver will find her. He is very thorough; you said so yourself.”

“He is.”

“Then it is only a matter of time.”

“Yes.”

She nodded.

At that moment, she was acutely aware of the distance between them, the width of the desk, the six or eight feet of floorboard and afternoon light.

“Thank you,” she said, “for sending for me.”

She turned toward the door, but his voice stopped her, quiet and without pressure. “You do not have to leave.”

Alice’s hand was not quite on the door handle. She did not turn. She looked at the grain of the wood and felt the warmth of the room behind her, the firelight against her back, and the particular quality of his silence, the one she had learned to read as something kept deliberately still.

She pressed her fingers to the doorframe briefly and then released it. “I know.”

She did not stay. But when she crossed the entrance hall and climbed the stairs and closed her door behind her, the quiet that settled around her was not the same quiet she had carried through a year of closed doors.

She sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her hands to her face, letting herself feel whatever it was for exactly one minute before she stood again.

The invitation arrived two days later, on a card engraved with a crest she did not recognize.

She was in the drawing room when Mrs. Finch brought it. Kenneth was not present, which meant she read it alone and then sat looking at the window for rather longer than the occasion warranted.

A ball. The Worthington house on Brook Street, Friday fortnight. The inscription across the top, in a hand that had the quality of a social obligation being discharged with the minimum possible warmth, was addressed to the Duke and Duchess of Bearmoor.

The Duchess, specifically, not a woman who had spent three Seasons without a single dance.