The Duke's Captured Bride

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“Frederick,” Kenneth gritted out.

Kenneth Stafford, the Duke of Bearmoor, surveyed the church with pursed lips. Two small, unmistakable figures darted between the pews with all the discipline of sparrows in a flour mill.

The twins. Seven years old and perfectly capable of reducing any solemn occasion to chaos within minutes.

He had known better than to bring them. He had known it with the same certainty that he knew the sky was blue or that estate ledgers required checking twice.

And yet here they were, his sons, because some well-meaning relation had insisted that children belonged at their father’s wedding, and because Kenneth, for all his ducal authority, had not possessed the energy to argue the point after the third draft of seating arrangements.

“Frederick,” he repeated, not raising his voice. He never needed to.

The shorter of the two boys froze mid-aisle, one hand braced on the prayer-book rack of an elderly baronet who looked as though he was regretting his decision to attend.

Freddie’s face, a miniature of his own—or so people claimed, though Kenneth could never quite see it—arranged itself into an expression of such studied innocence that it verged on theatrical.

“Your Grace,” a familiar voice sounded at his elbow, low and amused. “The resemblance is frankly alarming.”

Kenneth did not turn. “If you’ve come to mock me, Jonathan, I invite you to do so from a greater distance.”

Jonathan Crawford, the Marquess of Nortley, took up a position at his side anyway, folding his arms in a posture of such comfortable familiarity that several of the assembled guests exchanged glances.

“I’m here to support you on your wedding day, as any loyal friend would.

The fact that I’m enjoying myself while doing so is merely a fortunate coincidence. ”

Before Kenneth could formulate a response adequate to the provocation, Freddie materialized before them. His hair stood in wild tufts, his cravat hung askew, and his eyes held that particular gleam that Kenneth had learned to associate with imminent requests of the inconvenient variety.

“I need to use the necessary,” Freddie announced, with the grave urgency of a man reporting the fall of a fortress.

Kenneth stared at his son. “The what?”

“The necessary. To relieve myself.” Freddie narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. “You know, the chamber pot. The privy. The—”

“Frederick.” A woman in a dark dress materialized behind the boy. Miss Maria Leyton’s cheeks were flushed with what could only be described as utter mortification. “I do apologize, Your Grace. I did explain that the ceremony would commence shortly, and—”

“But I really need to go,” Freddie insisted, bouncing slightly on his heels. “It’s getting urgent.”

Kenneth closed his eyes. The organist had settled at the bench. The guests had arranged themselves into something approximating attentive silence.

Lady Rachel would arrive at any moment, and here he stood, discussing chamber pots with a seven-year-old who appeared to be experimenting with the limits of his patience.

“Take him,” he hissed to the governess. “Outside. Quickly.”

Miss Leyton curtsied and seized Freddie by the shoulder, guiding him toward the side door briskly.

Kenneth turned back to find Jonathan watching the retreat with undisguised delight.

“You’re doing remarkably well, considering,” Jonathan remarked. “Seven years as a sole parent to those two would break a lesser man.”

The words landed with more weight than he had perhaps intended.

Seven years. Kenneth had marked each one with the precision of a jailer counting days, each birthday and season and holiday another stretch of territory traversed without Theresa. Without help.

“I need this,” Kenneth said quietly. The admission cost him something; he could feel it in the tightness of his jaw. “Lady Rachel comes from good stock. The boys need stability. A mother.”

“What about you?” Jonathan asked. “What do you need?”

Kenneth did not answer.

The question hung between them, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable, until the sound of hurried footsteps broke the silence.

The governess appeared at the side door, her face drained of color.

“Your Grace,” she said, her voice pitched low with something that sounded dangerously like panic. “Lord Frederick… He was with me outside, and then… he was simply gone. I’ve searched the churchyard, I’ve asked everyone…”

Kenneth was moving before she finished speaking. The rational part of his mind informed him calmly that children wandered. That Freddie had a special talent for disappearing into small spaces and emerging grinning minutes later. That panic served no purpose.

The rest of him, the part that had stood in a corridor seven years ago and sworn an oath over two tiny screaming lives, did not care for rationality.

He pushed through the side door into the churchyard. Morning had given way to proper daylight, the kind that illuminated every cobblestone and tree with merciless clarity.

No small boy in sight.

“Freddie!” His voice carried across the yard, startling a cluster of pigeons into flight. “Frederick Stafford!”

No answer.

A woman clutching a prayer book directed him toward the street. An elderly man suggested the lychgate. A footman thought he might have seen a child near the carriages.

Kenneth checked each location with methodical thoroughness, his pace quickening with each empty search.

The rational part of his mind was growing quieter. The other part, the one that remembered red-faced infants and a promise made in a room thick with the smell of blood and sweat, was roaring now, a sound like wind in a tunnel.

He reached the street proper, where carriages lined the curb and early-morning vendors had begun setting up their stalls. A boy of perhaps ten or eleven was leaning against a wall, watching the proceedings with the bored superiority of youth.

“You,” Kenneth said, not bothering with pleasantries. “Have you seen a child? Seven years old, brown hair, in expensive attire.”

The boy considered him unhurriedly. “Might have. Depends what’s in it for me.”

Kenneth reached for his purse. A shilling changed hands.

“There was a nipper,” the boy said, pocketing the coin with practiced ease. “Sneaking about by the carriages. Little lad, looked right fancy. Saw him climb into the back of one just as a lady got in. Red-headed, she was. Pretty, in a round sort of way. Carriage took off toward the west road.”

Red-headed.

Kenneth’s mind sorted through the wedding guests.

He had seen precisely one red-headed woman today, and she had been seated in the front pew on the bride’s side.

From what he knew, she was Lady Rachel’s sister.

The quiet one, the one whose name he could not immediately recall, who had been introduced to him during his only visit to Peltbury House and had said nothing of consequence.

He was moving before the thought had fully formed, shouting instructions to his driver, his mind already calculating distances and routes.

Peltbury House lay to the west. The carriage would have a head start, but his horses were fresh.

As his carriage rattled into motion, Kenneth stared out at the passing streets with a focus fueled by the promise he had made in a room seven years ago to two small lives that entirely depended on him.

He would find his son.

And God help anyone who stood in his way.

Lady Alice Haraway slipped through the service gate of Peltbury House with ease, clearly used to being unnoticed. The cobbled yard behind the kitchens smelled of coal smoke and wet stone.

No one had seen her leave the church. She had counted on that. Her father had been too preoccupied with the final arrangements, the guests, the glorious triumph of securing a duke for his perfect daughter. Rachel had been sequestered with her maids, preparing for her grand entrance.

And Alice… well, Alice had simply walked out through a side door during a particularly fervent prayer, her footsteps swallowed by the organ’s swell.

No one would notice. No one ever did.

She knelt beside the rain barrel that leaned against the kitchen wall and felt beneath it with careful fingers until they closed on rough canvas.

The bag came free with a soft scrape of fabric against stone.

Not much inside: a change of clothes, the small savings she had managed to hoard from her quarterly allowance, a letter of introduction to her mother’s cousin in Bath who might, if the woman’s memory of family obligation extended that far, help her find respectable employment as a governess.

Enough to begin. Enough to be someone other than the invisible sister, the too-plump disappointment, the daughter who took up space and returned nothing of value.

“Are you running away?” A voice came from behind her, high-pitched and clear and entirely unexpected.

Alice dropped the bag. It hit the cobbles with a dull thud that seemed to echo in the confined space of the service yard.

She turned. A child stood watching her, his head tilted. Brown hair in wild disarray, Sunday-best clothes rumpled beyond redemption, and eyes that held an intelligence far too sharp for a boy who could not have been more than seven.

“You’re the Duke’s son,” she said, because it was the only thing her startled mind could produce.

She had seen him at the church. Both of them, nearly identical and unmistakable, causing the kind of mischief that only children at formal events could achieve.

“Frederick. Your father will be looking for you.”

“Freddie,” the boy corrected, with the air of someone who had endured this misunderstanding many times and found it tedious. “And probably. But I wanted to know where you were going. You left the church secretly. I saw you.”

Alice’s heart performed a complicated maneuver. “You followed me?”

Freddie shrugged, a gesture of such elaborate casualness that it could only have been learned from an adult. “You were sneaking away. Adults don’t do that.”

“And how is it that you came to follow me?”