Page 8 of Duke of Moonstone
Alexander set down his glass on a nearby table.
He was overreacting. He was a man who had spent ten years anticipating problems, and he was applying that habit where it was not needed. Eleanor was simply on her best behavior, which was what he had asked of her, and he ought to be grateful for it rather than standing here manufacturing reasons for suspicion.
He looked across the room.
Where did she go?
He scanned the ballroom once, quickly, the dancers, the groups near the windows, the people clustered around the supper table, and she was not among any of them. The doors to the terrace stood slightly open which they had not been a few minutes ago, and Alexander was moving before he had consciously decided to move.
The terrace was empty. He crossed it without stopping and went down the steps into the gardens, and there, further along the path than she should have been, moving fast and away from the house in the direction of the far gate, was the white figure of his sister.
She is meeting him here? The damned chit!The certainty landed in his chest like something cold. She had arranged it tonight, here, with two hundred of London’s finest in his ballroom not thirty yards away.
“Eleanor.”
She did not stop; she only walked faster which told him everything he needed to know. Alexander moved after her, jaw set and a very controlled anger building steadily behind it. He was not a man who shouted. He had never needed to. But Eleanor knew his voice well enough to recognize when he meant something, and she was choosing to ignore it. That choice was going to have consequences she would not enjoy.
Then she ran.
Alexander stopped for precisely half a second, surprised, because Eleanor had never in her life actually run from him, and then he followed because apparently this evening was determined to exhaust every resource of patience he possessed.
The path curved, and the figure ahead of him was faster than he had expected, but he caught up to her. As he was reaching for her shoulder, she stumbled forward before he could make contact. His body moved entirely without instruction.
He caught her around the waist, both of them jolting with the impact of it, and for a moment, neither of them moved. His arm was locked around her, and she was breathing hard, andthe whole situation was so far beyond what he had imagined his evening would contain that he had not yet caught up to it.
Then he registered, with a confusion that took a moment to resolve itself, that the figure in his arms was definitely not Eleanor. There was also a scent that was not his sister’s, a detail so small and so certain that it cut through everything else with startling clarity.
With his arm still around her waist, Alexander turned her to face him, and to his surprise, she didn’t resist.
He reached up and pulled the mask away.
The face that looked up at him in the darkness was not his sister’s.
He knew it immediately and completely: the line of it, the eyes, the particular stillness with which she was looking back at him. He had last seen that face across his drawing room two days ago when it had been considerably less frightened and considerably more combative.
Lady Frances Pembroke.
“You,” he rasped, his heart pounding. “Where is my sister?”
CHAPTER 4
“I…” Frances fumbled to answer, but no defense immediately came.
“I should have known.”
She flinched. His arm was still around her waist, and his voice was very quiet, and the combination of those two things was somehow more alarming than if he had shouted.
“Your Grace.” She put her hands against his chest, not pushing exactly, more the gesture of someone establishing that there was supposed to be a distance between them, and she felt him release her immediately, which was both a relief and, inexplicably, slightly worse. She took a step back. Her legs were not entirely steady. “Please. If you will allow me to explain?—”
“Where is my sister?”
“She is safe.” Frances kept her voice as even as she could which was not very even at all. “She is not in any danger, I promise you that. She asked me to help her, and I agreed, and she is... she is with someone who cares for her, and she is perfectly?—”
“She is with the schoolmaster.” It was not a question.
“She is safe,” Frances said again because that was the part that mattered, and she needed him to hear it before anything else.
“And you,” he said. “You have spent the entirety of my ball impersonating my sister.”
