Page 80 of Caught By the Ruthless Duke
“She will put that creature in her luggage,” she said with a sigh, as though pondering a deep philosophical concept. “She did it with a hedgehog in Shropshire, and we didn’t find it until Marlborough.”
“What happened in Marlborough?” Theodore asked, before he could think better of it.
Lady Bardwell turned to him with the expression of a woman who had been waiting three days for someone to ask. “The hedgehog escaped in the inn. It took four chambermaids and a stable boy.” A pause. “My husband offered a shilling in reward and caused a small riot.”
“We don’t talk about Marlborough,” Lord Bardwell said from the wall.
“Youdon’t talk about Marlborough,” Lady Bardwell pointed out. “The rest of us talk about it frequently.”
Peter had resumed reading. Mary was attempting to introduce Gerald to a disinterested spaniel that had wandered over from the adjacent field.
Cressida was laughing, and the sound was music to Theodore’s ears. Not the practiced laugh she offered in crowded drawing rooms, bright and measured and perfectly timed, but something freer. Warm enough to loosen something tight in his chest before he could guard against it. It rang softly through the air, unrestrained and utterly genuine, and he found himself listening for it even after it had faded.
God help him, he would have done nearly anything to hear it again.
A moment later, Theodore kept pace beside Cressida as the path widened. The garden opened around them in gentle sweeps of green and silver, but his attention remained fixed on her.
The curve of her smile, the brightness in her eyes, the faint amusement at her brother’s antics from earlier—it all transformed her face into something dangerously lovely.
Theodore could not remember when he had begun measuring days by her moods. When her laughter had become a thing he hoarded quietly, turning it over afterward like a miser counting coins.
It was absurd. More than absurd. It wasreckless.
He had spent years cultivating restraint, mastering every inconvenient impulse before it could master him in turn. Men like him did not lose themselves over a woman’s laugh. They certainly did not begin anticipating it, seeking it out, or arranging entire conversations merely to coax the sound from her lips.
And yet here he was, walking beside her with the ridiculous sensation that the entire world had sharpened at the edges simply because she was smiling.
“You should have warned me,” he said.
“I did warn you.”
“You said they were a great deal. You did not say—” He glanced at Mary, who was now in active negotiation with the spaniel. “You did not say this.”
“Would it have changed anything?”
He considered it honestly. “No.”
She looked at him. He kept his gaze ahead, but he was aware of her reading his face, looking for the thing he hadn’t said directly. He let her find it.
Ahead, Peter walked into a low branch. He lowered his pamphlet, looked at the branch with dignity, and walked on.
Theodore felt it move through him before he could stop it—not a laugh exactly, but more the structural damage that preceded one.
Cressida noticed. Of course, she noticed.
“There it is,” she said quietly.
“There what is?”
“You’re enjoying yourself.”
“I am observing a family in its natural state,” Theodore countered.
“That’s the same thing.”
It was. He didn’t say so.
Mary released the toad near the hedgerow—apparently a voluntary decision, which surprised everyone—and ran to catchup with Peter, seizing his arm and pulling him into whatever argument she had been building toward for the last ten minutes.
