Chapter 1 #2
He shrugged rather easily. Too easily, in fact. His lips stretched into a grin. “It was easy.”
Alice looked at him, and he looked back.
“I would like it,” she urged, “if you explained what it was that you did that was so easy.”
He grinned again, as though he had been waiting to be asked about his mischief.
“I saw the carriage standing there,” he explained. “And I saw you looking very sneaky for an adult, and while you were talking to the driver, I snuck onto the back. See? Easy.”
Alice closed her eyes and counted to three before speaking.
“Your father will be worried,” she said, gentling her voice into the tone she used with skittish horses and frightened housemaids. “We should get you back to the carriage. The wedding will be starting soon, and—”
“No, it won’t.”
The voice that interrupted did not belong to the child. It came from the gateway to the street, low, controlled, and carrying an edge that turned the spring air sharp as a blade.
Alice looked up.
The Duke of Bearmoor stood in the arched entrance to the service yard, and the word that came to her—the only word, inappropriate and unbidden—was magnificent.
She had seen him once before today, during his only visit to Peltbury House.
A formal introduction in the drawing room, Rachel blushing prettily beside their father, Alice hovering at the periphery where she belonged.
He had been handsome then, in the remote way of portraits and statues, a man constructed of good breeding and correct angles.
But distance and propriety had obscured the quality of him that was now impossible to ignore: the sheer physical presence of a man who occupied space as though he had been granted exclusive rights to it.
Up close, he was something else entirely. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a jaw that looked carved from something that would break lesser tools. His eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made the bag in her hand feel suddenly irrelevant.
“Your Grace! Your son followed me,” Alice said, because someone had to speak, and the Duke appeared to be engaged in the silent work of gathering his composure. “I never realized until now…”
“Explain to me,” the Duke demanded, each word measured with the care of a man placing explosives, “why my seven-year-old son is standing in your service yard, when he should be at the church watching his father get married.”
“I had no idea he came along, Your Grace,” Alice replied. “I didn’t know he was there. I would have returned him immediately if—”
“She didn’t do anything wrong,” Freddie interjected. “I followed her because she…” He hesitated. “Because she got into the carriage and I was bored!”
The Duke’s gaze did not waver from Alice’s face for a few seconds. When at last he spoke, it was not to her. His eyes flickered downward.
“Frederick!”
Gone was the bravado the boy had demonstrated, though his eyes hardened after a brief flicker of vulnerability. “Yes, Father?”
“Explain to me,” the Duke spoke, his voice ice-cold, “why you were running around wildly on my wedding day.”
The boy hesitated, and Alice felt the strange urge to speak for him. However, one look at the Duke dissuaded her.
“You see, Papa…” The boy shifted. “It’s like this. Miss Leyton wasn’t watching and I got bored, and I saw the carriage and nothing was happening anyway, so I thought I would just greet the horses outside, but then I saw this lady and wondered where she was going, and…”
He said it all in one breath, and Alice lowered her head to hide the smile threatening to pull at her lips.
“And you, My Lady?” The Duke turned to her, and her head snapped up. “You were sneaking away with my son in the back of your carriage?”
Before Alice could formulate a response, the clatter of hooves and wheels announced another arrival.
A carriage pulled up at the front of the house. It was her father’s carriage, the crest visible on the door.
Donald Haraway, the Earl of Peltbury, descended hurriedly. He did not notice them immediately. Alice watched as he turned to the footman who had jumped down beside him and spoke in a low, urgent hiss that carried nonetheless into the quiet yard.
“Find Rachel. Immediately. Check her chambers, the garden, the… everywhere. She must be somewhere. We can’t have lost a grown woman!”
The footman nodded and hurried into the house.
Her father turned and froze. Then, his face performed a series of adjustments that Alice could have cataloged for a study on the physical manifestations of dread.
“Y-Your Grace,” he said, recovering quickly. “This is… I assure you, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for—”
“Where,” the Duke asked icily, “is Lady Rachel?”
Her father’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Alice watched the calculations visibly ticking behind his eyes as he weighed options, consequences, the precise calibration of humiliation.
“Your Grace, if we might step inside…”
“No.” The single syllable landed like a door slamming. The Duke turned to his driver, who had remained at a discreet distance with the carriage. “Take my son inside. Keep the door closed, and for heaven’s sake, do not let him out of your sight.”
“But Father, I don’t want to go, I want to…”
The protest was ignored.
The carriage door closed with a definitive click, leaving the three adults in the service yard with the spring sunshine and the weight of whatever came next.
“Lord Peltbury,” the Duke said. His voice had dropped another octave, into territory that Alice suspected few men ever heard and fewer still emerged from unchanged. “I’m going to ask one last time: where is your daughter?”
Lord Peltbury looked at Alice. For one bizarre moment, she thought he might attempt to deflect, to suggest that the wrong daughter had been the subject all along, that the Duke had confused his intended bride with the sister no one remembered.
The moment passed. Something in his face settled into the exhausted acceptance of a man who had run out of lies.
“Gone,” he said. The word emerged flat and stripped of ornament, the first honest thing Alice had heard from him in years. “Rachel is gone. And I do not know where.”