Caught by the Forbidden Duke (Caught by the Duke #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“The noise won’t follow you inside.”

It was, Dominic reflected, the least convincing claim he had made in recent memory.

The double doors of Fairmont House stood ahead of them, and the sounds of the gathering pressed through them regardless: voices overlapping voices, laughter with too much wine in it, the distant scrape of chairs, and a thread of music that started, stopped, began again.

A married couple swept past them up the steps without a glance.

But James, his nephew, had not moved.

He had his mother’s dark hair and eyes—nothing of the Barrow coloring—and Miss Hartley had pressed his coat to a crispness that had survived the carriage ride from Silverford House.

Now, he was watching the doors the way he watched most things that alarmed him: with the concentrated attention of someone calculating exactly how much danger an unfamiliar thing might present.

Dominic crouched to the boy’s level, lowering his voice beneath the passing conversations.

“Lucien is a friend of long standing. His household is orderly. These people will not require anything of you beyond your presence.”

“It’s loud,” James said, but did not look at Dominic when he said it.

His attention had fixed on a woman near the railing who was laughing at something; a bright, carrying laugh that wanted a crowd to sustain itself.

Dominic refrained from sighing aloud. Perhaps it was impossible to cozen the child, so it would do him better to just tell the truth here. So, he said, “It will be louder inside. That is simply the nature of such evenings.”

James absorbed this with no visible appreciation for the honesty. “Then I don’t want to go in.” He sounded as though he were skirting the edges of petulance but couldn’t quite fall right in.

For that, Dominic thought, he must be doing something right with the boy.

“I understand that.” He kept his voice even.

“You will not be required to speak at length with anyone you would rather not. Miss Hartley will stay with you. All that is asked of you is to be present. You cannot avoid these situations indefinitely. Society will be here regardless of whether you choose to meet it.”

That came out harder than he had intended. James’s shoulders drew up slightly. He was still watching the woman by the railing, as though if he didn’t look at Dominic, the comment might not have been directed at him.

“An hour,” Dominic said. “Perhaps a little more.”

James said nothing for a beat, then he nodded once.

Dominic straightened, making sure to keep his relief from showing on his face, and placed a brief hand at the boy’s back; enough to guide without pressing, and they went inside.

The ballroom held upwards of two hundred guests at a conservative estimate, and was therefore already warm, over-lit, and producing the level of noise Dominic had not promised James would follow them in. Dominic made sure to keep his expression bone straight.

The musicians in the far corner had committed to a brisk tempo.

Chandeliers threw candlelight across silk and jewels in equal measure, and two hundred guests performed the social arithmetic of a ton event in full motion: the considered smile, the weighed glance, the conversation that was never entirely about the thing it appeared to be about.

Dominic moved through it the way he had moved through such rooms for the better part of a decade, with a version of ease he had maintained long enough that it required no conscious effort.

He acknowledged acquaintances in passing, paused where politeness required it, and kept James in his peripheral view throughout.

The boy pressed close to his side, eyes down, mouth flat, and endured. Miss Hartley maintained her appointed distance behind them.

He found Lucien Stanton near the center of the room, deep in conversation that soon paused with visible relief at the arrival of a different subject. Beside him, his wife Elinor was composed, with dark eyes that moved through a room and collected everything worth knowing before she spoke a word.

“Dominic.” Stanton extended his hand with genuine warmth. “You actually came.”

“Of course I did. You’re my best friend.” Dominic glanced down to find James had pressed somewhat closer at his side, examining the floor with studied attention. “Lucien, Elinor, this is James. My nephew. Son of my first cousin Graham.”

Neither of them bore down on the boy with the theatrical warmth that adults often inflicted on children they did not know.

Elinor crouched quite naturally to something near his eye level and said, “Good day, James. I’m Elinor. It’s lovely to meet you, James.”

James’s gaze lifted from the floor for a brief moment, then quickly returned.

Dominic knew this was rather more engagement than most people had managed in the past month.

Dominic caught Miss Hartley’s eye above the boy’s head and tilted his chin toward the chairs along the east wall, quieter, away from the orchestra, as far from the crowd’s worst density as the room permitted.

“Shall we find somewhere a little more comfortable, my lord?”

James went with her without argument. Dominic watched them thread through the press of guests.

“Still settling in, I imagine,” Lucien assumed.

“He is,” Dominic said, and Lucien, who was a better friend than he sometimes deserved, let it rest entirely.

“Ashworth settled the Denholm matter finally,” Lucien said. “Three years and a string of useless solicitors, and Fenton resolved it in a fortnight.”

“Fenton always resolves things in a fortnight,” Dominic said. “It is the three years of useless solicitors that are the essential preparation.”

“And Carrington,” Lucien added, with the air of a man saving the better item for second. “Married. Six weeks ago. In considerable haste.”

“Is he pleased with himself?”

“Unreasonably.”

“It never lasts,” Elinor said, without looking up from her glass. “A full season of domestic reality tends to revise that sort of satisfaction rather thoroughly.”

“That’s rather hard on the man,” Lucien said.

“I have attended enough weddings to speak with some authority on the subject.” She said it with perfect serenity. “He will do very well. In a year or two.”

“This will be our only event this season, as it happens,” Lucien said presently.

“Estate business at Fairmont, considerably overdue, and Elinor wanted to come. We leave tomorrow.” He said it with mild resignation.

“I had hoped this evening might at least give Annabelle the chance to be seen properly before we go.”

“She isn’t in the room?”

“Preparing. She’s to play the pianoforte later.”

Dominic accepted a glass from a passing footman. Elinor was drawn into conversation with an acquaintance across the room. Lucien was claimed by a gentleman from the local magistracy who spotted the gap in conversation and crossed to them at once, his expression brightening as he came.

And Dominic, left momentarily to himself, let his gaze travel across the assembled company as a matter of long habit.

He ended up glancing toward the east wall instead.

The chairs stood empty…and Miss Hartley was not among them. Neither was James.

He set his glass down on the nearest surface and moved.

He tried the withdrawing room first, then a small parlor, then a room where three older women stopped mid-sentence at his appearance and resumed the moment he left.

He kept his pace measured throughout, fast enough to cover the ground, steady enough not to attract notice. The Duke of Silverford conducting an open search through another duke’s townhouse was exactly the sort of incident that traveled.

He found Miss Hartley in the corridor beyond the main ballroom, speaking in urgent, lowered tones to two footmen. She turned at his approach. Her mouth opened before she had the words. Her eyes went to the footmen and back.

“Your Grace—”

“Where is he?”

“The footmen have been checking each room—I believe he has simply found somewhere quieter—” She stopped. He said nothing. The two footmen became deeply occupied with the floor. “He slipped away, Your Grace. The room grew very crowded, and when I turned to look—” Another stop. “He slipped away.”

“How long ago?”

The pause before she answered was, itself, the answer. “Ten minutes, approximately.”

He addressed the footmen without raising his voice. “Every room on this floor. Now.”

He turned from them and went deeper into the house, corridor by corridor, following the reasonable logic that a boy with James’s preferences would have put as much distance between himself and the ballroom as the building allowed.

He started at the far end.

“Lady Annabelle, if you do not hold still, I shall never get the left side even.”

“Mills,” Annabelle said, with the patience of someone who had been standing still for a considerable time and was prepared to be reasonable about it for approximately two more minutes, “the left side is fine.”

“It is not, my lady. It is three-quarters of an inch lower than the right.”

“Three-quarters of an inch is not visible to any human eye in a candlelit ballroom.”

“It is visible to my eye,” Mills said, and the brief silence that followed indicated, with precision, whose eye mattered in this room.

Helena Thrupton, perched on the edge of the writing desk with both feet dangling and the untroubled confidence of someone dressed and ready an hour ago, watched the whole exchange with bright amusement.

“You look beautiful,” she offered.

“I look like a woman being prepared for the marriage market,” Annabelle said pleasantly.

“That is a rather grim description of what is, if anything, a very becoming gown.”

“It is also an accurate one.” Mills stepped back with the satisfied air of a craftsman and indicated, with a small gesture, that Annabelle might now turn.

Annabelle turned.

The gown was blue—a soft, modest shade—and the cut was well-judged, lending her figure a composed elegance she had never arrived at through any effort of her own.

She tested the range of movement at her wrist. Satisfactory. She would need her hands free for the performance.