A Duchess for his Baby (Dukes of Redemption #4)

Chapter 1

“Imust say, Lord Harwick, your dedication to this particular metaphor is truly extraordinary.”

Lord Harwick blinked. He had been comparing Isadora’s eyes to the sea for the better part of three minutes, going on and on about the deep, fathomless sea twice, and had apparently not considered that she might find this less moving than he intended.

“I… I only mean to say,” he pressed on, with the particular confidence of a man who had never once been told he was boring, “that a lady of your refinement deserves—”

“You are very kind,” Isadora cut in pleasantly. “If you will excuse me.”

She turned before he could gather himself for another round, slipped neatly between two couples navigating the edge of the dance floor, and did not look back.

The sea. She had heard variations on the sea for three consecutive Seasons now, and she was beginning to develop a rather personal grievance against large bodies of water.

The ballroom was, by any reasonable account, magnificent. The Duchess of Fernleigh had outdone herself with candlelight everywhere, dripping from chandeliers the size of small carriages, catching the crystal and the silver and the jewels around every throat in the room.

The flowers alone must have cost a fortune, as the white roses banked against every column, their fragrance thick and heady in the warm air.

On the far side of the room, the orchestra was in excellent form, and the dancers moved beneath the light like something out of a painting—all color and motion and practiced grace.

It was, by every measure, a beautiful evening.

Isadora found it exhausting.

She paused near the edge of the room, where the crowd thinned slightly, and the air was marginally cooler, and pressed one gloved hand against the other in a gesture that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with keeping her composure.

Across the room, she could see Letitia. Her younger sister’s hair was bright beneath the chandeliers, her expression luminous with the joy of someone encountering a grand ballroom during their first Season and finding it entirely as wonderful as expected.

She was laughing at something a young man had said. She had been laughing all evening.

Good, t at least one of us is enjoying themselves. The thought filled her with genuine warmth and only a small, private ache.

She looked for William next and found him easily. Her brother occupied rooms the way he occupied most things, with a natural authority that required no effort. He was speaking with a small group near the doorway, tall and composed, and Cecily stood at his side with her hand lightly on his arm.

Even across the room, even in a crowd of over two hundred, the way William angled himself toward his wife and the way he looked at her made the observation feel almost like an intrusion.

That was what Isadora wanted. Not the poetry about the sea.

Not the flattering speeches from Lords whose names she had already half-forgotten.

But that quiet, certain gravity that pulled two people toward each other in a room full of other people, without either of them seeming to notice it happening.

The orchestra moved into a new set. A gentleman she recognized vaguely—Lord Whitfield, or possibly Whitmore, she could never remember—began walking purposefully in her direction with the look of a man who had been working up his nerve for half an hour.

Isadora turned away.

She did not do it hastily. She simply found a gap in the crowd and stepped into it. Then she kept moving with the composed expression of having somewhere to be, which she absolutely did not.

She was becoming rather good at this. Three Seasons had taught her certain useful things.

She turned away from the dancers and walked directly into a solid, warm chest.

“Careful.” A hand shot out to steady her, gone almost before she registered it.

Isadora looked up.

Oh.

She had years of practice at looking at James Harcliffe and arriving at the same conclusion, which was that it was entirely unfair for a man to look the way he did while also being the way he was.

Her brother’s oldest and closest friend was tall, the kind of tall that announced itself in a doorway and broad through the shoulders in a way that his coat acknowledged rather than disguised.

He was possessed of the physical ease of a man who occupied his own body without apology or effort.

His dark brown hair was always slightly less ordered than fashion strictly required, which she had long suspected was a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

His jaw appeared to have been designed with some structural intention, and his hazel-green eyes were sharp, the kind of eyes that were always doing something, always reading the room or the person or the space between the two, even when the rest of him was performing carelessness.

He was, in short, exactly as handsome as he had been the last time she had seen him, which had also been inconvenient.

He stood before her with his glass tilted safely to the side, his expression already arranging itself into the ease he wore the way other men wore their coats—effortlessly, as though it had been cut for him.

He was, as always, irritatingly well-put-together. Dark coat, white cravat, the kind of careless perfection that suggested either an excellent valet or an infuriating natural aptitude.

Both, probably.

The candlelight was doing him no disservice whatsoever, which was also unfair.

Several years, and one would think I would have grown accustomed to it.

“Lady Isadora.” His tone was warm, unhurried. His eyes moved over her face with swift assessment. “I must confess I’m surprised.”

“Are you.” It was not quite a question.

“I expected to find you in whichever library this house has managed to assemble.” He glanced briefly at the room around them, the dancers, the noise, the brightness of it all. “Not willingly attending a ballroom.”

“I attend ballrooms,” she said.

“You endure ballrooms,” he corrected pleasantly. “You have made the distinction, and your expression has been making it quite clear all evening.”

All evening?

She filed that away.

“You have been watching my expression all evening?”

“I have been watching the room. Your expression was simply the most legible thing in it.”

She looked at him. He was smiling. A smile that suggested he was genuinely amused.

Years and years of this, and he is still the most aggravating person I have ever met.

“Not everyone takes pleasure in ruining their reputation. Though I imagine,” she raised a brow, “you would know a great deal about ruining one’s own reputation… at gaming hells.”

He pressed a hand to his chest with an expression of profound injury. “I am wounded.”

“You’ve survived worse.”

“Not from you. You are particularly accurate.” He dropped his hand. His eyes were still amused, which was deeply unfair. “What have I done to deserve your poor opinion tonight specifically?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I think of you exactly as society does. Only more accurately.”

“That is either a tremendous insult or a tremendous compliment, and I find I cannot tell which.”

“I know,” she said sweetly.

He laughed, and she felt the peculiar small satisfaction of having elicited it, which she resented immediately because she was not trying to amuse him. She was simply being honest, which happened to have the same effect.

Before he could answer, she saw it.

Across the ballroom, moving with the smooth purposefulness of a woman who had spent three hours waiting for precisely this opening, was Lady Pembley, resplendent in dark blue silk, with her daughter Caroline at her side.

Caroline was very beautiful. Isadora registered this with clear-eyed assessment, and she had no interest in pretending otherwise.

Fair hair, a graceful neck, the luminous quality of a young woman in full possession of her own attractiveness and aware of every room she entered.

She was looking at James with a warm expression that had clearly been practiced.

Lady Pembley’s gaze had already found its target with the precision of a navigator sighting a fixed point.

Isadora looked back at James quizzically. “Wait a moment. Did you approach me,” she asked, keeping her voice low and pleasant, “because Lady Pembley has been trying to set you up with Miss Caroline all evening?”

Something moved across his face. It was very fast, barely a flicker, but she had been watching his expressions in her brother’s house since she was old enough to know what to look for.

“I approached you,” he said carefully, “because I nearly knocked you down.”

“You approached me because I was the nearest woman in the room who could credibly be described as an acquaintance.” She arched a brow. “Am I wrong?”

A pause that lasted precisely one beat too long.

“Lady Pembley,” he said, his voice slightly lower, “has spent the entire evening engineering situations in which her daughter and I are briefly and unavoidably alone together, and it has been working so far. I mean, we’re friends, but that is how far I can take it.”

“How terrible for you both.”

“Isadora.” It came out quiet.

She looked at him. He looked back, something slightly more honest in his expression now that the performance had slipped.

“Yes,” she said, laughter threatening to slip out. “I thought as much.”

He exhaled. “If you laugh at me, I will never forgive you.”

“I am not laughing at you. I am quietly appreciating the situation, which is entirely different.” She looked toward Lady Pembley and her daughter again, whose progress was slowed by the necessity of appearing not to be making progress. “She is very persistent.”

“She is relentless,” he muttered. “She has been relentless since February.”

“Perhaps,” Isadora said, biting the inside of her cheek, “society has finally decided that even James Harcliffe must marry eventually.”

James looked pained. “Society can mind its own affairs.”

“Society has no affairs other than other people’s. That is rather its defining characteristic.”

She glanced back toward Caroline, who was now perhaps thirty feet away and closing the distance with steady patience. She really was extraordinarily pretty.

“She is very beautiful, at least.” She said it lightly, in the tone of someone noting an unremarkable truth.

James followed her gaze.

“She is,” he said easily.

She found herself looking at him as he looked at Caroline, and his expression was as honest as his reply.

The word settled somewhere it had no business settling. Isadora kept her expression precisely as it was—composed and faintly amused—and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He had agreed with an observation she had made. That was all.

The orchestra eased into a waltz, and the dancers moved into formation around them.

Isadora decided that standing still in the middle of a ballroom while a waltz played was its own kind of conspicuous.

“You should dance,” she said quickly.

“I should do a great many things.” James glanced again toward the Pembleys, now caught temporarily in conversation with an elderly earl who had materialized somewhere to Lady Pembley’s left. “Most of them I have no intention of doing.”

“Careful. That almost sounds like a principle.”

“Do not tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain.” He winked.

She opened her mouth to give a ready response, something dry and precise, when a figure appeared at James’s elbow. A footman, moving with deliberate quiet as though he had been instructed to be discreet.

“Forgive me, My Lord.” He inclined his head toward James. “A gentleman has just arrived and is asking to speak with you. He says the matter cannot wait until morning.”

The shift was immediate. James’s shoulders stiffened a fraction, the easy amusement on his face rearranging itself into curious seriousness.

“Where?” he asked.

“The front hall, My Lord. He would not come further.”

James set his glass on the nearest surface without looking at it. An unfathomable emotion flashed behind his eyes.

“Is it the solicitor?” Isadora asked because he had gone very quiet, and she could not help herself.

He turned to her with an expression that said he had half-forgotten she was there.

“I could not say.” His voice was even, measured. Nothing like it had been three minutes ago.

“Your gambling debts,” she said lightly. “Has one of your creditors finally grown impatient and come to collect in person? I always wondered how that worked.”

It was the kind of line that would have ordinarily elicited at least a pained smile.

“Stay here,” he said, already turning away. Then he followed the footman through the crowd and out of the room.

Isadora stood where he had left her.

“Stay here.”