The Duke’s Orphaned Baby (Dukes of Redemption #3)

Chapter 1

“Absolutely not. Do not look at me like that. You are not coming.”

William did not raise his voice, which was precisely why both girls froze.

Isadora opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again in the particular way that meant she had prepared an argument, but didn’t particularly know how to deliver it.

“William–”

“No.”

“You haven’t even heard–”

“I don’t need to.” He straightened his cuffs without looking at her, keeping his voice low.

The ballroom doors were twenty feet away, and already he could hear the orchestra tuning, the particular restless murmur of two hundred people deciding how the evening would go.

“Whatever you were about to say, the answer is no.”

Letitia, who had been hovering just behind her sister with an expression of elaborate innocence, dropped the pretence. “We only want to watch. From the doorway. No one would even notice us.”

“I would notice you.”

“You’d be too busy dancing with Lady Somebody to notice anything.”

“Letitia.”

She fell silent, but her chin lifted in that way she had—their mother’s chin, their mother’s stubbornness, which was either a gift or a catastrophe, depending on the hour.

Isadora, more strategic, tried again. “It’s only a party. It isn’t as though Brighton has never seen two young ladies standing in a doorway.”

“Brighton,” William said, finally turning to look at them both, “is precisely the problem.”

They were in the corridor outside the east wing, where the candlelight was mercifully dim, and no one from the party had yet wandered.

Isadora was sixteen and trying very hard to look reasonable.

Letitia was fourteen and not trying at all.

They were both dressed far too carefully for an evening they had clearly hoped to attend, which meant they had been planning this for at least an hour—had dressed for bed, waited, and then crept down on the reasonable calculation that he would be too distracted by guests to be thorough.

He was never too distracted to be thorough.

“The men in that room,” he said, keeping his voice even, “are not the kind of men I would introduce you to.”

“They’re your friends,” Letitia pointed out.

“Exactly.”

A pause. Isadora had the grace to look slightly unsettled by that. Letitia looked like she was filing it away for future use.

“Go to bed,” he ordered. “Both of you. Mrs. Hatch will have noticed you’re gone by now, and she’ll be catastrophizing somewhere on the second floor.”

“She catastrophizes regardless,” Isadora scoffed. “It’s her primary occupation.”

Despite himself, something tugged at the corner of his mouth. He suppressed it. “Bed. I mean it.”

“You always mean it,” Letitia said, aggrieved. “That’s the trouble with you. Other guardians don’t always mean it.”

“Other guardians have the luxury of not meaning it. I don’t.

” He said it without heat, simply as a fact, because it was one.

He looked at them both for a moment—Isadora with her book-serious eyes, Letitia still flushed from the argument—and then said, more quietly, “Brighton is not London. People here are looking for something to talk about, and they will not be careful about who they talk about. I will not give them your names. Do you understand me?”

Neither of them answered immediately.

“Do you understand me?” he asked again, and his tone had changed just enough.

“Yes,” Isadora replied.

Letitia exhaled dramatically through her nose. “Yes.”

“Good. Go.”

They went, Letitia’s slippers scuffing against the floor in deliberate protest, Isadora’s hand finding her sister’s arm at the foot of the staircase in that quiet, steadying way she had.

William watched until they reached the landing and then turned away, rolled his shoulders once beneath his coat, and pushed open the ballroom doors.

The room received him the way rooms always did—a slight shift in attention, a ripple outward from the entrance, the particular awareness that preceded his name.

He smiled before anyone said a word.

“Your Grace.” Lord Ashby materialized at his elbow with a glass already extended. Brandy, as expected. He was a tall, weathered man with the comfortable bearing of someone who had spent thirty years being right about horses and wrong about marriage. “We’d nearly given you up.”

“The evening is young.” William accepted the glass. He took a swallow and let the warmth settle before it reached his face. Then he smiled. “And I’m reliably told that my entrances are more effective when you’ve had time to miss me.”

“Reliably told by whom?”

“Everyone who’s ever thrown a party worth attending.”

Ashby laughed, which set off a small chain of laughter around them, the particular warm sound of people who had been waiting for permission to enjoy themselves.

William moved into it the way he moved into most things—with ease, with attention, with the precise calibration of a man who had learned very early that charm was not a gift but a skill, and like all skills, it required maintenance.

“Your Grace, you must settle something for us.” This from Mrs. Vane, who materialized on his other side with the efficiency of a woman who had been watching the door for twenty minutes.

She was handsome and knew it, and deployed the knowledge strategically, which William respected.

“Lord Pembury claims the easternmost bathing machines are superior to the western ones on account of the tide. I say the whole enterprise is undignified, regardless of direction.”

“Mrs. Vane,” he said, turning to give her his full attention, which was a thing that had its own effect, “I find the most dignified thing about bathing machines is that no one can see you inside them.”

“And the least dignified?”

“Everything that happens when you come out.”

She laughed, pleased, and looped her arm through his as though she had every right. He let her. It was easier that way.

“Have you met Captain Reeves?” she asked. “He insists Brighton would be a duller place without you.”

William inclined his head toward the captain. “I am relieved to know I contribute something beyond rumor.”

Reeves grinned. “Oh, the rumors are the best part.”

William raised his glass. “Then I drink to being useful.”

Laughter followed. Someone clapped him on the shoulder. The orchestra struck up, and the room shifted, skirts brushing past boots, voices rising as couples arranged themselves for the next dance.

Mrs. Vanelooked up at him expectantly. “You will dance?”

“Of course.” He was already setting aside his glass. “It would be unkind to disappoint the room.”

He took her hand. It was warm, untroubled. The steps were familiar enough that his body required little attention. He spoke easily as they moved.

“You favor Brighton, Your Grace,” she said.

“I favor escape,” William answered. “Brighton merely pretends to be one.”

She laughed again, delighted by the answer, though it cost him nothing to give it.

When the dance ended, another lady was waiting. Then another. He lost track of names somewhere between the third turn around the floor and the fourth compliment on his coat.

“You are wicked,” one woman declared.

“I am economical,” he corrected. “I make excellent use of opportunity.”

“Do you ever tire of admiration, Your Grace?” asked a young widow, her gaze lingering.

“Only when it grows dull,” William replied lightly. “So far, it has not.”

They finished the dance, and he returned her to her companion with a bow that made her smile and fan herself vigorously. Then he accepted a glass of brandy from a passing footman and stationed himself near enough to Ashby’s group to be sociable and far enough to breathe.

He told a story then—something outrageous involving a boat, an offended magistrate, and a misunderstanding that grew worse with every retelling. The circle around him expanded. Laughter broke loudly, too loudly, and someone demanded he repeat the ending.

As he spoke, he leaned back against a column, brandy once more in his hand, posture loose, expression careless. It was a role he had perfected long ago.

And yet between one laugh and the next, his gaze lifted.

The doorway remained empty.

He noted it without thinking, a quiet reckoning beneath the noise. Too long since he had sent them away. The hour had advanced. Letitia would be pacing, and Isadora would pretend she was not listening for footsteps in the corridor.

“You have gone silent,” someone remarked.

“Have I?” William smiled easily and turned back to the group. “A dangerous habit. Pray, interrupt me at once.”

They obliged.

The orchestra played a livelier tune. A lady tugged him toward the dance floor again. He went because that was what was expected. Because Brighton wanted him loud and laughing and untroubled.

He delivered all three.

But even as he spun his partner beneath his arm, his attention snagged once more on the entrance. On the knowledge of what lay beyond it. On the responsibility he had deposited there and could not set aside with his coat.

It is a curious thing, how one can be at the center of a room and yet keep part of oneself stationed elsewhere entirely.

It was a good party. The kind that required nothing of him beyond his considerable ability to seem like he was enjoying himself, which tonight required very little effort because he mostly was.

He liked people. He liked rooms full of them, liked the noise and the negotiation of it, the way he could learn everything he needed to know about a person by watching how they moved through a crowd.

When the music ended and applause rose, he bowed, smiling, charming, entirely present.

And then, without knowing why, he reached again for his glass.

It was Ashby who found him an hour later, surrounded by a group of men with brandy in their hands. “You look like you’re enjoying yourself enormously. Your Grace.”

“I know.” William glanced at him sideways. “It’s one of my better skills.”

Ashby smiled and was about to say something else when a footman materialized at William’s elbow—not the bold materialization of someone delivering champagne, but the quieter, deliberate approach of someone with a specific errand.

“Your Grace.” The footman stepped forward and offered a folded note on a small silver tray. It was sealed with plain wax, no crest, nothing but his title written on the outside in an unfamiliar hand. “I was asked to deliver this.”

“By whom?”

“A boy, Your Grace. Outside. He’d gone before I could ask further.”

William took it with a smile already in place.

“Another invitation?” Ashby nosily asked, peering over his shoulder. “You’ll be the ruin of Brighton if this continues.”

William gave a light laugh and broke the seal.

The words were few.

Meet me at the eastern shore in half an hour. It concerns your sisters. Come alone.

He read it twice. The noise of the room seemed to recede—not vanish, but dull, as though someone had closed a door inside his head.

For a brief moment, he felt nothing at all. Then his fingers tightened.

“Well?” someone next to him prompted. “Is it scandalous?”

William folded the paper neatly once, then again, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat. The smile returned to his face without effort. It had never required effort.

“Hardly,” he said. “I am disappointed myself.”

Laughter followed. Someone demanded he stay for another round. A lady tugged lightly at his sleeve.

“Just one more dance, Your Grace,” she said. “You cannot abandon us now.”

“Alas,” William replied, lifting his glass in farewell, “even dukes must occasionally breathe.”

He drained the last of the brandy, set it aside, and made a show of stretching, as though the night had simply grown tedious.

“Fresh air,” he added lightly. “I shall return improved.”

Ashby watched him closely. “You rarely leave a party early.”

“Then treasure the occasion,” William said. “They are so rare.”

He turned before another question could be asked.

Outside, the night was cool and sharp, the air carrying the distant scent of salt. The sound of the party was muffled the moment the terrace doors closed behind him.

He stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust. The lamps along the drive cast long, uneven shadows across the gravel as he descended the steps alone.

Then he reached into his pocket and unfolded the note again.

It concerns your sisters.

He stood there in the dark, the paper in his hand, the sea a black weight at the edge of everything. The party glittered on behind him. Somewhere above him, two floors up, his sisters were asleep—or pretending to be, which was close enough.

He folded the note. Put it away and walked towards the water, coat collar turned up against the wind, boots striking the ground in a steady rhythm, the folded note heavy against his chest.

By the time the lights of the house faded behind him, the laughter might have belonged to another man entirely.