Page 66 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The figure separated them again. She moved down the line and felt the absence of his hand at her waist the way one felt a draught after warmth, a specific and measurable cooling of the air.

She completed the crossing and turned.

He was watching her. He was always watching her, she had come to understand, in the particular deliberate way of a man who had decided to pay attention and was finding the decision expensive. She could see it in the tight set of his mouth, in the way his hands fell to his sides in the pause between figures with a studied precision that was in itself a form of restraint.

She felt the warmth building at the base of her throat and repressed it, and met his gaze across the line of dancers, trying with considerable effort to appear cool and collected.

They advanced toward each other for the final figure.

“I should like to tell you something,” he said, when they were close enough for it.

“The music is still playing,” she reminded him.

“I am aware.”

The promenade brought their shoulders together. She could feel the warmth of his coat sleeve against the silk of her gown.

“Tell me later.” Her voice was remarkably level.

She did not look at him. She turned correctly through the figure, her feet obeying their weeks of instruction, her heart doing something considerably less disciplined.

“Alice.”

“The music is still playing, Kenneth.”

A beat. She felt him exhale beside her, short and controlled, the sound of a man exercising patience at some cost to himself.

The music eventually came to a close, and they returned to their starting positions.

He held her hand a second longer than the dance required. The contact lasted, warm and deliberate, through the applause of the other couples, through the rustle of ladies stepping back, through three full seconds of the room rearranging itself around them.

Then he released her hand, and the air rushed in where his warmth had been.

Alice folded her hands together and looked at the middle distance, feeling the second set of nerves arrive—the ones that had nothing to do with dancing at all.

Chapter Twenty

“Your Grace.”

She had been standing near the long windows with a glass of ratafia she had not touched, watching the next set begin, when a woman materialized beside her. The woman from the refreshments table. She was as composed up close as she had been from across the room, her manner well-bred and her smile the particular variety that arrived already prepared.

“Forgive me. I am Lady Haverstock. We have not been introduced. But you are the Duchess of Bearmoor, and everyone in this room knows who you are.” She paused. “That must be rather novel for you.”

The inflection on novel was, in isolation, entirely neutral. Alice was quite good at isolation.

“It is,” Alice said pleasantly. “And everything in London is novel. One adjusts.”

Lady Haverstock tilted her head. “Indeed. You seem to be adjusting remarkably well, considering.” She glanced toward the dance floor, where the next set was starting. “Though I wonder—and forgive me, this is perhaps impertinent—whether it was very difficult to step into the late Duchess’s shoes. She was very accomplished. Played the pianoforte exquisitely. Danced magnificently, people always said.” A small pause, perfectly placed. “One does wonder how a second duchess manages the comparison.”

The fair-haired young woman had drifted to Lady Haverstock’s side. She held a glass of champagne and looked at Alice with the bright attention of someone who had been brought specifically to witness this.

“And tonight,” Lady Haverstock continued pleasantly, “it was your first dance in public. How very brave, especially given what people have been saying.”

Alice held her glass and looked at the woman, at the practiced warmth of her expression and the careful calibration of her cruelty, which was nothing like the Cheswick sisters, nothing like her father, and nothing like anything she had faced before, because it came dressed in perfect civility and delivered its knife in a place she had not thought to protect.

“… danced magnificently… One does wonder.”

“People say many things,” she replied, her voice even. “I find most of it grows less interesting the closer one examines it.”