Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Isadora tried her very best not to glance at Nicholas too many times over breakfast. Every few seconds, it felt as though her gaze rebounded back to him, ensconced in front of his paper the way he always was.
They had woken together, and he had kissed her before sending her away to her rooms to dress.
And now they ate breakfast together the way they did every morning, as though nothing of consequence had happened. How could he behave so calmly when it felt as though her very veins were fizzing? As though with one look or harsh word, he could cast her into despair?
The door opened, and Sophia hurried into the room, dressed in a cream dress with purple ribbons. “Good morning, slugabeds!” the girl said cheerily. “Are you looking forward to today?”
“Today?” Isadora glanced at Nicholas, who set down his broadsheets, confused. “What’s today?”
“The fair!” Sophia enunciated the words as though Isadora was being foolish. “Did Papa not tell you?”
“Oh dear, is it Tuesday already…” he said with a sheepish grimace. “I may have promised Sophia we would visit the village fair. I trust you have made no other plans.”
“None that can’t be adjusted,” Isadora laughed, newfound joy lifting her spirits. “To think, the great duke attending a fair.”
“Fairs are fun places,” Sophia explained sagely, eyes glowing. “Everyone should be allowed to attend.”
Nicholas arched a brow at Isadora. “Did you hear that?”
“I did. Consider my baseless assumptions well and truly corrected, then.” Isadora smiled down at the little girl. Truly, it was incredible to think that this was her life now.
This was her family, her day, her future.
Family truly was the people you chose.
Nicholas found he was enjoying the fair more than he’d anticipated when he’d first made the promise to his daughter a week ago.
The tamed bear was unexpectedly friendly, waving at Sophia, and he had managed to steer both Isadora and Sophia away from the cockfighting, which was taking place in a small tavern close by.
In another tavern, a bout of prizefighting was also taking place, but Nicholas had already decided to give it a miss.
After all, he was here in his guise as a duke, not as Will.
Strange how both personas felt like characters to him; mantles he could assume when the moment was right, not the person he actually was.
He was Nicholas, a man, not a duke.
When Isadora smiled at him, he felt alarmingly as though she saw the man, and that was perhaps the scariest thing of all.
They needed to speak about last night and everything that had transpired, but every time he summoned his courage to address the matter, she smiled, looking so blissfully happy that he didn’t want to tarnish her happiness.
Sophia dragged them to a stall where the proprietor called all and sundry to knock over a series of tin men with small balls; if they succeeded, they would win a prize.
“I want… that one,” Sophia said, pointing to a doll dressed in rags.
Nicholas could not be certain it had not once been a shoe.
Still, if she wanted it, he would do his best. After paying a couple of pennies for the honor of taking part, he stood where the man gestured and readied his shots.
He had three. If he knocked all three tin men where they appeared very precariously balanced, Sophia would win her doll.
So he took aim, exhaled, and perhaps because he knew Isadora was watching, hurled his first stone with a touch too much enthusiasm.
The tin man flew off its stand.
Sophia laughed excitedly, clapping her hands together. He’d seen her like this so infrequently, as though she were a child once again after living for him as an adult for so many years.
Unexpected joy flooded him as he took aim again. Another tin man fell down.
Then the third.
The proprietor was all greasy smiles and unctuous praise, and Sophia held her chosen doll aloft, triumphant.
“Thank you,” she giggled, beckoning his face down so she could peck his cheek. “Izzie, which do you want?”
Isadora blinked, looking as startled as he felt. “Pardon me?”
“Which doll? So Papa can win you one, as well!”
Isadora raised her brows at Nicholas. “Are you going to win me a doll?”
He cast his gaze around the fair. Sophia had been right in many ways: there were many members of the ton assembled in the sunshine, wandering about the different stalls, playing games, and fingering trinkets to buy.
Nicholas could have purchased the entire fair for Isadora had he wanted, and it would not have been an inordinate strain on his finances.
But there was something especially charming about the idea of winning a prize for his wife with his effort.
Not a doll, however. Unlike Sophia, she was not a child.
He saw a collection of small, bound books at a local stall and led the way.
For this, he had to pay considerably more, and to win, he had to toss a small wooden hoop over a series of small stakes hammered into the ground.
A few throws in, he realized the activity was more difficult than he had assumed, and when he failed, he immediately bought another round.
Eventually, he had enough successful hoops to win one of the books. It was imperfectly bound with string, and inside was a collection of dubious poetry from an unknown source. All the same, Isadora thanked him with a curtsy and a smile.
“Now you must kiss him,” Sophia said with perfect sincerity. “Just the same way I do.”
Isadora’s cheeks turned ever-so-slightly pink as she glanced at him. Her raised eyebrows seemed to convey that whether or not they kissed was down to him; he could choose either, and she would go along with it.
Couples did not habitually show each other such intimate acts of affection in public, but they were at a fair, surrounded by people from all different walks of life, and he had a sudden, overwhelming desire to kiss her.
Perhaps it was a primal urge—to show the world how much she was his.
He held out a hand. “Come and receive your prize, then, wife.”
“Certainly, husband.” Her eyes glittered with amusement as she approached. He wrapped his arm around her waist and pressed a quick, chaste kiss to her lips instead as he handed her the book. When he leaned back, she blinked up at him, looking a little dazed, the smile still on her lips.
The lips he had claimed.
Sophia laughed and clapped her hands together. “That was perfect!”
Nicholas released Isadora, and they all walked together through the crowd, pausing every few minutes to greet someone or another.
Isadora spotted a friend she had made at the picnic—an American girl, by the looks of it, but rather less dramatically brash than he had presumed an American would be—and fell back to greet her, Sophia’s hand still tucked in hers.
That left him to walk on ahead alone. The crowd thinned and swelled around him, all bonnets and parasols and the smell of trodden grass and frying sugar.
Christ, how long had it been since a day held anything so ordinary as this?
Still, he felt a strange longing for his wife and had half a mind to turn back when a familiar dark head caught his eye, bent close to her husband over some private disagreement.
“Eliza?”
His sister looked up from the argument, and her whole face changed. “Nicholas! You are… outside!” She rushed over to him, rising on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“Where’s Marie?” he asked, glancing past her into the crowd.
“Heavens if I know. She wandered off, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since.
Fear not, Nick,” she put in when Nicholas stiffened, “she was with a friend, and there’s a footman with them, so they’re properly chaperoned.
I knew she would abandon us at the first moment she could, so I made provisions. ”
With a footman and a friend accompanying her, he could hardly find fault, yet the very notion of Marie being free to do as she chose in a place like this set his hackles up all the same. “I don’t like it,” he gritted.
“Well, you may not, but you surrendered the responsibility of looking after her long ago,” Eliza retorted, half in jest. “She is a handful for anyone, and that very much includes me. I don’t see you volunteering.”
“I have Sophia.” He tracked a flash of pale hair through the crowd to where his daughter stood haggling with a ribbon-seller at Isadora and her new friend’s side. “And she promises to be just as much of a handful in a few years.”
Eliza laughed lightly. “Well, hopefully Marie will be married soon, which will give us all a little breathing room. You won’t know how eager you’ll be for Sophia to marry until she comes out and is immediately besieged by eager gentlemen seeking her hand in marriage.”
“Does she have a gentleman in mind?” Nicholas asked sharper than he’d meant to.
He ran through his wider acquaintance for anyone who might have made an offer for his sister.
There were plenty, no doubt; he may have made himself a stranger through her girlhood, but he had never let her want for anything money could buy.
Pin money fit for a princess, and now, a dowry to match.
“I… believe she might,” Eliza said, a trifle mysteriously. “Oh, there she is now!” She pointed, but when Nicholas turned, all he saw was Oliver Chant waving at them.
Nicholas’s two identities collided.
Will, the prizefighter, who would have been at the fights this afternoon had he not made a silly promise a week ago to his daughter. And Nicholas, the Duke. Two men who were the same and not the same, and whose identities had been exposed in the blink of an eye.
Chant stared at him as though he had never seen him before, and Nicholas knew this was it—his gig was up. He would have to come clean to everybody.
But first, he looked around for Isadora.
If he were to come clean to Chant, he ought to also come clean to Isadora, and to do that first. Now that they’d been together, and now that he’d confided in her about Grace, if they were to have any chance of the happiness she so craved, he would have to tell her everything.
When he saw her, however, she and Caroline were not alone.
No—standing with them was none other than Nathaniel Windham.
Nicholas saw red. That blackguard had over and over embroiled himself in their lives, making things difficult, and now here he was targeting Isadora in public, making Nicholas look foolish, and no doubt upsetting Isadora, too.
Not to mention Sophia.
“Excuse me,” he muttered to Eliza, and whirled, striding back to Isadora and Windham, who was still smirking positively slickly beside her. The man’s gaze flicked up, and Nicholas gave his coldest smile. “Pardon me,” he snarled. “But what the devil do you think you’re doing, cornering my wife?”