He Came
Beatrice stepped into the supper room and stopped short.
Oh, dear.
The room itself was lovely. Candles glowed along the sideboards. Flowers spilled from silver bowls. The long tables gleamed beneath snowy linen. But instead of arranging the ices near the kitchens, the footmen had set them in pride of place at the center of the room, directly beneath the candles.
Already, one lemon ice looked dangerously close to becoming soup.
“No,” Beatrice said, with more calm than she felt. “No, no, no. The ices must be moved at once. And the syllabub should not be beside the fish. Good heavens, why is the syllabub beside the fish?”
The next fifteen minutes became twenty.
Then twenty-five.
By the time the supper room was no longer in danger of disgracing Ambrosia’s first large entertainment as duchess, nearly half an hour had passed.
But Gideon would wait.
Wouldn’t he?
Because he had come.
Gideon had come.
And he had said—
Beatrice paused just outside the supper room door while guests began flowing past her in eager, hungry clusters.
“I was wrong.”
No.
More than that.
“You do not have to do anything. Obviously. That was rather the point I failed to grasp before.”
She pressed one hand briefly to her stomach.
For all the hardening she had believed she had done to her heart, it had taken Gideon Rothmore less than two minutes to turn the whole useless organ into a consistency more soup-like than the ices…
Which was… inconvenient.
But he had come. And he was waiting.
The announcement for supper had sent the guests moving in the opposite direction she now needed to go, and Beatrice had to pick her way between them.
Normally, she would have maintained her watchfulness.
She’d notice a gentleman’s hand on a young lady’s elbow.
A whispered invitation. A glance toward a darkened corridor.
But not right now. For once, her focus narrowed to one thing.
Gideon.
Finding him again. Hearing what he had come to say.
Could it make any difference?
All summer, she had been coming to terms with the truth that marriage—to Gideon or anyone—was impossible for her. She could not be managed. Could not belong to a man who believed care gave him the right to issue command.
And she doubted such a man existed.
And yet—
She stepped around a broad-shouldered gentleman in a wolf mask and drew in a breath.
Then halted. Not perfume. Not flowers. Not beeswax or punch or expensive cologne.
Something faintly rotten beneath a sharper note of cloves.
The back of her neck prickled.
But someone laughed behind her, another guest brushed her sleeve, and the current of bodies swept the masked gentleman away before she could turn properly.
Beatrice frowned.
Then shook herself.
She had kept Gideon waiting long enough.
At last, she slipped through the terrace doors.
The summer night, fragrant with roses, settled around her. Lanterns had been hung along the stone balustrade, their light softly illuminating the gardens below. Beyond them, the lawns rolled away into shadow, and above, the first true stars pricked the sky.
It was beautiful.
She’d appreciate it some other time.
Lifting her skirts, Beatrice hurried along the terrace, moving past a pair of guests laughing near the steps, past a footman carrying an empty tray, past the curve of the house where the music dimmed and the gardens opened more privately before her.
Only then did she slow.
Dignity, after all, was not to be abandoned entirely simply because a man had traveled half the length of England to… apologize.
She smoothed her gown, drew one steadying breath, and walked the final few steps at a more respectable pace.