Chapter 20
A s they all walked back into the house, Emily felt Adam’s presence somewhere behind her.
She knew it before she turned from the garden path and stepped through the open doors.
She had felt the force of his attention on her back with enough certainty to imagine for one reckless instant that he might ignore every sensible instinct left in him and take her aside before the party could fully reform.
The house defeated that hope at once.
The moment she crossed the threshold, an older woman caught her hand with cheerful firmness. “My dear, you must come in this instant, or the tea will cool, and half the ladies will begin inventing tragedies.”
“Mrs. Ashcroft, I do not?—”
“Frances,” Mrs. Ashcroft whispered, turning to her mother, who stood just a few inches beside her. “Do not keep your daughter hidden after such a triumph.”
Frances, still in the full pleasure of victory, turned with bright satisfaction. “Emily, here you are. Mrs. Ashcroft wishes to congratulate me properly and insists she cannot do so unless you hear every word.”
There was no graceful refusal possible. Not for Frances’s daughter. Not for the new Duchess of Huxley. Not in a house where the whole point of hospitality was that people belonged to one another’s convenience for a few well-bred hours.
“I suppose I have a few minutes to spare,” Emily relented, a smile she hoped was convincing enough resting on her face.
“Perfect!” Mrs. Ashcroft gushed.
Emily let herself be drawn into the main drawing room, where tea had already been served and the late afternoon was reorganizing itself into smaller, more intimate traps.
The servants moved through the room with fresh cups and plates of little cakes, and napkins were changed before any stain had quite become visible.
Older ladies settled into the best chairs like women who had outlived the need to hurry.
Younger ones, on the other hand, drifted about in bright little knots, talking over the flowers, the competition, tomorrow’s ball, and all the other things that kept the entire place alive.
Emily had no chance to look for Adam at first. People took up her time too quickly.
One lady praised her gown. Another praised Frances’s victory as though Emily had had a hand in cultivating the roses. A third spoke of her marriage in the affectionate tone women reserved for brides whose happiness they preferred to assume rather than examine.
Emily answered all of it with the composure expected of her and felt under every compliment the sting of what she was being made to represent.
A new wife.
A young duchess.
A lovely creature beginning married life under the happiest of circumstances.
If only they knew.
Perhaps some of them did know something.
That thought came and went.
The house party had eyes everywhere. Still, none of them knew the depth of it as she did.
None of them knew what it was like to be looked at by Adam as if he meant to consume her and then left alone in the marriage bed.
None of them knew what his hands could do to her in a ballroom and how he still withheld himself afterward.
At last, she found him.
He stood near the fireplace speaking to Jasper, though speaking was a generous word for what he was doing.
He was present in the way men were present when their minds had left the room entirely and only the body remained.
His gaze met hers for one moment over the heads of three ladies and one potted fern.
The look was enough to send a slow, dark awareness through her.
He had meant to come after her.
The knowledge pleased her far more than it should have.
“My dear,” Lady Lake spoke up, reclaiming Emily before she could linger in that look. “I have a favor to beg. Lady Winter and Mrs. Polkington missed the judging entirely, and they will never forgive me unless someone charming receives them as though they had not.”
Frances gave a small laugh. “Then Emily must save us all.”
There it was. The trap within the trap. A few late-arriving ladies and older guests, too important to be ignored, too harmless to refuse. Emily could no more deny the request than she could overturn the tea table.
“Of course,” she said.
Lady Lake beamed as if this settled everything in the most natural way.
It did. That was the whole misery of it.
No one here was acting against Emily. They were simply using her exactly as a house like this used a newly important young woman, bright, marriageable even in marriage, socially useful, pretty enough to place where the room needed extra ease.
Adam could hardly object without sounding deranged.
The new arrivals were ushered in. One wanted to hear every detail of Frances’s winning arrangement. Another praised Emily’s composure with the offensive sympathy older women often wore when discussing young brides, as if endurance and beauty were adjacent virtues.
Emily listened, smiled, answered, and felt Adam’s denied impatience like weather gathering at the edge of the room.
Then he tried.
It happened so quickly she nearly missed it.
He crossed toward her at a moment when one of the ladies had paused to sip her tea and the path looked briefly clear.
He had almost reached her when Lady Winter, with all the serene selfishness of age and rank, began asking her about the rooms upstairs and whether the blue suite was comfortable for a couple.
Lady Lake turned at once to add a remark about the view and the fires, and Adam was left standing with nothing to do but pause, lower his head, and retreat again.
Emily watched his retreat and understood more from that one thwarted attempt than she had from half his previous confessions. He wanted her alone badly enough to try to ask her in public.
The realization settled into her with dangerous sweetness.
Very well, then.
If the house meant to keep him waiting, she would not spare him the lesson.
She let herself relax more fully into the part the room required of her. She smiled more easily. She accepted a second cup of tea that she did not particularly want and turned to Lady Dunsmore, one of the guests she was meant to entertain with all the tenderness expected of a young duchess.
“And how do you fare today, my lady? Your rheumatism was troubling you at breakfast.”
“Abominably,” Lady Dunsmore said, settling deeper into her chair. “There is rain in the air. I feel it in every joint.”
“Then I shall trust your knees above any barometer.”
The old lady gave a pleased little huff. “You are a sensible girl. Too many young women laugh at such things.”
“I would not dare. My mother always says that a woman who ignores pain in the bones will live to regret her vanity.”
Across the room, Adam watched her.
Emily felt it with every answered question and every gracious smile. She gave the room precisely what it expected: composure, brightness, and easy usefulness. Beneath all of it, she kept one quiet awareness alive. Adam was watching every minute.
She did not flirt. She did not need to. Just having him across from her was enough to keep her calm. Something about being rather poised and out of reach seemed to have an effect on her. One she was certain he could also feel at that very moment.
Then, the same gentleman who had attacked her in the garden, whom she had come to know as Lord Redwick, entered the room.
She saw him first because the room changed subtly around his approach. He still carried himself with cultivated ease, a man convinced that being civil had managed to erase everything he had done in the past.
That thought made Emily laugh out loud.
He moved closer enough to her and bowed low.
“Your Grace, I hope the afternoon has recovered from its excitement.”
Emily set down her cup. “It appears to be managing.”
“I am relieved. I feared the contest had overset the peace of the house.”
“I would say the house seems sturdier than that,” she responded, almost in a tone that suggested disregard.
Alas, he didn’t get the hint. Instead, his gaze sharpened.“And His Grace?”
Adam’s gaze struck across the room so hard she almost felt it.
Emily kept her voice mild. “His Grace is also quite sturdy.”
A small laugh passed from one chair to another.
Lord Redwick seemed to believe himself safe among teacups and ladies too old for scandal.
“Then we may all breathe again,” he said. “A duke in a temper is such a formidable object.”
Jasper’s voice came lazily from near the mantelpiece. “Redwick, I would stop there.”
Lord Redwick’s smile thinned.
Adam had not spoken. He had not moved. Even so, from across the room, he looked capable of undoing the fragile civility of the hour with one badly timed sentence and both hands.
Lord Redwick bowed again. “I have detained you for too long, Your Grace.”
“Not at all,” Emily said.
He withdrew with prudence.
Lady Dunsmore leaned closer. “That man has a gift for making one grateful when he leaves.”
Emily nearly laughed. “You are severe, my lady.”
“I am old enough not to care what people think of me anymore. I am afraid there is a difference.”
Emily laughed now, and by then the room had shifted again.
The tea was thinning into the softer disarray before dressing for dinner, and the trays were being carried out. Yet the strain between her and Adam continued to sharpen even more.
A part of her could not help but wonder if this was in any way influenced by the conversation they had with Harriet the night before leaving Huxley Manor. Had she realized how starved she was of his love when they spoke about children that she decided to give him a taste of his own medicine?
Was she just too comfortable around familiar people that he became a second option?
She had spent the late afternoon trapped in plain sight while he watched her be occupied, admired, delayed, and used by the house’s ordinary machinery. He had been made to wait, and she had let him.
A footman approached Lady Lake and leaned close enough for Emily to hear, “My lady, Mrs. Whitmore asks whether the first dinner bell should be rung.”
“In ten minutes,” Lady Lake responded.
“Yes, my lady.”
Frances called from the other side of the room, “Emily, darling, did you know if Leonora came with her ivory bracelets?”
Emily shrugged. “I definitely saw them on her this afternoon.”
“Thank heavens. She would mislay her head if it were not attached with pins.”
Marina laughed. “Do not say that before dinner. She will take it as a challenge.”
Emily turned toward them, answered what was required, and only afterward realized that Adam had moved closer.
He was not close enough to speak, but she knew this was him making his presence known. He stood near the long windows now, speaking to Jasper and another gentleman whose name she had forgotten.
Every time he drew near enough to make private reckoning possible, the house pulled her away. Some part of her still wanted desperately for Adam to stop her somewhere with no room left for courtesy and say what all this waiting had made of him.
“Your Grace.” A gentleman who had stopped by the women’s table to speak to her specifically pulled her out of her reverie, sketching a brief bow. “You must tell me whether His Grace’s library is truly as remarkable as rumors claim.”
Emily blinked. “The library?”
“Of course. A maid who had previously worked in Huxley Manor now works for me, and I may or may not have heard her mention at some point that the library was as extensive as they come.”
Emily shrugged. She had only been in the library once or twice and had never taken the time to think of what it contained. “I suppose one could say it is extensive.”
“And do you read from it?”
“When I can steal the time.”
“Then His Grace is fortunate to have a wife who improves his shelves by using them.”
From several feet away, Adam narrowed his eyes, and Emily knew from the look on his face that he was just dying to know what the man was saying to her.
Soon, dinner was announced, and the words moved through the room like a command. Emily joined the flow toward the dining room and was about to take her seat when she felt him look at her.
This time, there was no mistaking it.
She lifted her eyes and found him watching her. The band between them was stretching now. The unmistakable hunger on his face was growing, and it was only a matter of time before everything snapped.
Around them, guests seated themselves, and servants poured wine.
Adam’s eyes, however, never left her.