Chapter Twenty-Six
After dinner, it took Nicholas approximately two minutes before he excused himself from the men drinking port in the dining room to go in search of Bea in the drawing room.
He spotted her immediately. She’d drifted away from her mother and stood near a marble column, pretending to examine a painting. Nicholas approached quietly, his arms folded behind his back.
“Did you intend to start a riot?” she murmured without turning.
“No,” he said softly. “I intended to defend you.”
She turned to face him slowly.
Her eyes—sea-green, bright with unshed emotion—searched his. “Why?”
He could have given a dozen answers. A hundred. Political advantage. Point-scoring. Courtship strategy.
All lies.
So, he gave her the truth.
“Because you were right.”
Her breath hitched.
“And,” he added, voice lowering, “because Hargrave deserved his humiliation.”
A soft, startled laugh escaped her. It was barely more than a breath, but it undid him.
Nicholas stepped fractionally closer and touched her wrist. “You do not need anyone’s permission to think.”
“No,” she whispered, eyes dropping to his mouth before jerking back up, “but no one has ever said so aloud.”
“I am not ‘no one.’”
“I know,” she said. Too soft.
The air changed.
He felt it as surely as he felt the pulse beneath her skin. A pull. A shift. A surrender neither of them had meant to give.
Bea’s lips parted, as if she meant to say something more, something dangerous.
But her mother called from across the room. “Beatrix, dear, Lady Crawford wishes to speak with you.”
Bea blinked hard, as if waking from a spell. “Yes, of course.” She stepped back, the movement too quick, almost flustered.
Nicholas let her go.
Because he had to. Because if he reached for her, even briefly, even innocently, it would only complicate things.
An hour later, when the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing room, Winston wasted no time cornering Nicholas near the mantel.
“That display at dinner was ill-advised,” the duke said. He was not snarling, but he said it with the precise tone of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Nicholas met his gaze steadily. “With respect, Your Grace, your daughter deserved better than to be dismissed.”
Winston’s expression did not change, but something tightened at the corners of his eyes. “A gentleman may disagree without staging a performance.”
The phrase landed with a familiar chill—his father’s rule dressed up in another man’s mouth: don’t perform, don’t feel, don’t give them you. Nicholas inclined his head, a gesture of courtesy, not concession. “If defending Lady Beatrix appeared theatrical, then I make no apology for the spectacle.”
A faint beat of silence.
The duke’s jaw flexed slightly.
Across the room, Bea glanced up from a conversation with a pair of older matrons.
Her eyes found Nicholas at once. Gratitude flickered there—a soft, unguarded warmth—followed almost instantly by that same shadow he’d noticed in the carriage.
Guilt. Again. She masked it quickly, but it was unmistakable.
Winston followed his daughter’s gaze, then looked back at Nicholas. His voice remained perfectly even when he spoke again. “We are still in the early stages of arranging a match,” he said. “Stability matters. Diplomacy matters.”
Nicholas narrowed his eyes. Was that a threat?
Heat surged up his spine. “And integrity matters. Lady Beatrix should never be expected to silence herself for anyone’s comfort.”
The duke studied him for a long, heavy moment, measuring the man who had just contradicted a dining room full of Tory peers. “Take care, Vanover. Agreements not yet sealed may still be withdrawn.”
Oh, that was definitely a threat. Nicholas’s jaw tightened, but his voice stayed calm. “If defending her costs me your favor, I will bear it.”
Something in Winston’s expression shifted…faintly, almost imperceptibly. Not approval. But not disdain either. A recalibration.
He placed a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder, a subtle assertion of authority. “You’re bold,” he said quietly. “I like that about you. Just be certain your boldness doesn’t outrun your judgment.”
Nicholas met his gaze unflinchingly. “On the contrary, Your Grace. I believe my judgment has never been clearer.”
Bea’s eyes caught his again from across the room, guilt, worry, conflict, all swirling together.
As Nicholas watched her, he was certain. He would face down every man in England if it meant easing that look from her eyes.
Hours later, when the party finally dispersed, Bea stood with her parents near the front door. Nicholas stepped to her side. He offered his arm again.
She hesitated—not from disdain, not from carefully cultivated Winslow nonchalance, but because everything inside her had been rattled loose tonight. Still, she set her hand on his sleeve. Her fingers betrayed her with a tiny tremor. She prayed he didn’t feel it.
“I’m riding back with you,” he said quietly. “Your father may prefer to pretend I do not exist at present, but I would see you home.”
A ridiculous flutter moved through her middle. “You needn’t trouble yourself.”
“Too late,” he murmured. “I’ve already made it my trouble.”
She had no response for that, not one that wouldn’t reveal far too much.
When they reached the Winslow carriage, he handed her up with a care that felt…intentional. Protective. Her parents were already seated opposite, her father’s attention fixed firmly on the window as Nicholas took his place beside her.
Bea sat, pulse misbehaving. He sat close enough that even the warm summer night air between them seemed charged.
The door closed.
For the first time since dinner, silence wrapped around them, thick, humming, intimate.
She should have been more worried about her father.
About the inevitable disdainful lecture she would receive once they were privately behind closed doors at home.
And yet, all Bea could think of was Nicholas.
He defended me. Twice. He defended me against my father.
Every moment from the last several days flashed through her in a dizzying cascade.
Him listening, really listening; him watching her with that frustratingly perceptive gaze; him coaxing her opinions forward instead of dismissing them; him teasing her out of moods she didn’t even realize she was in; him bringing her to Parliament; and then…
defending her as though he’d been waiting for the chance.
Piece by piece, an unavoidable truth settled, heavy and hot, low in her chest.
She didn’t just want him. She liked him. Admired him. Looked forward to him. Missed him. And that—dear God—that meant…she was falling for him.
The realization struck like a physical blow. Her breath faltered. Her pulse stumbled.
But beneath that heady rush, guilt twisted sharp as a blade.
Her drawings. Her mistake. The Bow Street Runner. She was falling for the very man she had mocked and maligned in print for months. He saw the guilt in her eyes. He had to.
Nicholas shifted beside her. “Bea,” he said softly.
Her name in his voice sent a quiet, unwelcome tremor through her, and she hated that it did. She kept her gaze fixed ahead, acutely aware of the carriage’s close quarters—and of her parents seated opposite them.
Still, she looked at him. Just briefly. The open sincerity in his eyes caught her off guard, made her pulse stumble.
The carriage jolted over a rut. She tipped toward him, and his hand came out at once, steadying her elbow.
She stilled, and so did he.
For a suspended moment, neither of them moved, as though the smallest shift might draw notice. His hand remained where it was—correct, careful, unmistakably restrained—yet the contact was impossible to ignore.
Her breath caught. She willed herself to steady it.
Nicholas withdrew his hand at last, slowly, deliberately, as though to prove—to himself as much as to her—that he could.
Their eyes met again. Something unspoken passed between them, taut and unresolved.
The carriage wheels slowed.
They were home. The familiar outline of her parents’ town house came into view through the window, a reminder—solid and immovable—of where she stood and what she could not afford to risk. If Nicholas discovered that she was B. Adroit and told her father…he would disown her. Or worse.
The carriage rolled to a stop. The footman opened the door, and warm lamplight spilled inside.
Bea drew a careful breath and straightened, schooling her features, even as her pulse refused to settle.
Nicholas deserved the truth. Not an explanation. Not a clever evasion. The truth.
The certainty of it sat heavy in her chest, for she had no notion of how one confessed something like that to a man who had just defended her honor as though it were his own.
She knew one thing for certain. Not here. Not tonight.
But as she prepared to step down into the lamplit street, an awful thought occurred to her.
Soon, she might have to choose between her secret…and him.