Page 68 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Of course.” He glanced across the room with an ease that was, Alice thought, slightly performed. “I had the pleasure of knowing his first wife, briefly. Theresa. A remarkable woman.”

“I have heard that about her.” Alice kept her voice pleasant.

“And the boys? The twins, Frederick and Charles.” He turned back to her, and his eyes held a glint she could not place, a warmth that was too particular, too focused. “They must be what, seven now? Eight? I have not had the opportunity to meet them. Theresa spoke of them constantly, before—” He stopped. His voice had roughened, and the roughening was genuine, which made the conversation more troubling rather than less. “She would have been so proud of them.”

“They are wonderful boys,” Alice said.

“I imagine so.” He looked at her with that too-warm attention. “I wonder whether I might pay a call at Bearmoor House at some point. Simply to meet them. I have no one left who knew Theresa, you understand. The boys are her legacy, the last—” He stopped again, collecting himself with visible effort. “It would mean a great deal.”

Alice looked at him. His face was earnest, and his grief seemed real. Her hands, she realized, had curled slightly against her skirts.

She did not know precisely what was wrong, but she knew that something was.

“My husband manages the boys’ schedules,” she said. It was the truest and most neutral answer she had.

“Of course.” He nodded, accepting this. “Of course. Would you—Might you mention it to him?”

“I would not want to raise a hope I cannot confirm,” Alice said. “My husband is very particular about the boys. As he ought to be.”

Tidswell’s face shifted, barely. The pleasantness did not leave it, but something beneath adjusted, recalibrated.

“Naturally,” he said. “One would expect nothing less from Bearmoor.” He paused. “Though I wonder if he is perhaps too particular, given the circumstances. Boys ought to know where they come from. Who loved their mother.”

“The Duchess of Bearmoor,” said a voice directly behind Alice, quiet and carrying the weight of a door being shut, “manages her own schedule.”

Kenneth stepped up to her side. He did not touch her. He simply stood beside her, close enough that the sleeve of his coat brushed against her arm, and stared straight at Tidswell.

“Tidswell,” he said.

“Your Grace.” The Baron’s smile held. “We were just speaking of your late wife. Her Grace and I were⁠—”

“I heard.” Kenneth’s voice was quiet, and the quietness was not gentle. “My wife mentioned she would not raise a hope she could not confirm. That is also my answer.”

Tidswell’s expression did not crumble. It adjusted, smoothed over, rearranged itself with the speed of a man who had practiced rearranging it. “Of course. I understand entirely. I hope I have not caused any offence. My attachment to the late Duchess’s memory⁠—”

“Is your own affair.” Kenneth looked at him with the particular quality of attention that had, Alice had observed, the same effect as a raised voice without any of the noise. “Not my family’s. Not my sons’. If you wish to remember her, I suggest you do so privately.” A pause. “Good evening.”

Tidswell bowed. He walked away across the ballroom with the unhurried ease of a man who had suffered no particular defeat. Alice watched him go and felt a strange, cold chill skitter down her spine.

Kenneth was very still beside her. She could feel it, the specific quality of his stillness that was not calm but its opposite, all of it held motionless by will.

“He is no one,” she said quietly.

She did not know why she said it. She had not been afraid of Tidswell.

“Indeed,” Kenneth agreed. His voice had not changed.

She turned to look at him. His jaw was set, and his eyes, following Tidswell’s retreat across the room, had the focused quality of a man filing something away rather than letting it go.

Then he looked at her, and his expression shifted into something that was not entirely composed, the edge of whatever lived beneath the control visible for a moment, the way a candle flared before it settled.

“We are leaving,” he declared.

Alice looked at the room, the chandeliers and the silk and the musicians who had not yet finished the second hour of a program that had at least one more.

Kenneth held out his arm. “Unless you prefer to stay?”

She looked at his arm. At the white of his sleeve, the set of his jaw, and his controlled stillness. He clearly wanted to be elsewhere.