Page 41 of Duke of Moonstone
Lady Halford was gracious. The viscount looked disappointed. The baron rose as Frances stood and told her it had been the most stimulating conversation he had enjoyed in months, and Alexander put his hand on the small of her back to guide her toward the door with a pressure that was perhaps firmer than strictly necessary.
In the carriage, Frances sat across from him with her hands in her lap, and her brow creased with worry.
“Shall I have Mrs. Wells prepare something when we arrive? A tisane, perhaps?”
“That will not be necessary.”
“You look pale.”
He did not look pale. He looked exactly as he always looked which was composed and controlled and entirely unreadable, and the headache that did not exist pulsed behind his eyes with all the insistence of something that was not a headache at all.
She reached across the space between them and lightly touched his hand. Briefly. Her gloved fingered against his, lasting no more than a moment.
“I hope it passes quickly,” she said.
Alexander looked at her hand, and then at her face, and the concern there was so real and so undeserved that something turned over in his chest with a slow, sick weight.
You are jealous. You are jealous of a viscount who smiled at your wife, and you have dragged her from a dinner where she was brilliant.
You damned fool!
“Duchess.”
Frances looked up from her embroidery. The needle stilled between her fingers. She had not seen him since the Halford dinner. He had handed her down, said goodnight with the clipped efficiency of a man closing a ledger, and disappeared into his study. He had not appeared at breakfast.
And now, here he was.
“How are you faring today?” she asked. She set the embroidery frame on the table beside her. “Is your headache better?”
Something moved across his face—surprise, she thought, or perhaps the particular discomfort of a man who had not expected to be asked. He stood very still for a moment.
“I am well now,” he said. “A good night’s rest was all that was required.”
He looks tired. A good night’s rest indeed.
The silence that followed was the kind that sat between two people who had too many things to say and no safe place to begin. Frances folded her hands in her lap. The Duke remained in the doorway, which was becoming something of a habit with him—standing on thresholds as though the act of entering a room required a strategic assessment first.
“My mother is feeling stronger today,” he said. “She is ready to meet you.”
The words landed in Frances’s chest with a small, bright jolt. She had been waiting for this.
“Today?” Frances said.
“If you are willing.”
“Of course, I am willing. I have been willing since I arrived.”
Something about this seemed to catch him off guard. His jaw shifted, and he gave a brief nod. “Then, if you would come with me.”
Frances rose, smoothed the front of her morning dress, and crossed the room. The Duke stepped aside to let her through the doorway, and as she passed him, she caught the faint scent of his shaving soap.
She walked ahead of him into the hallway.
They reached the main staircase, and the Duke fell into step beside her. His stride was longer than hers, but he adjusted it without being asked, which Frances noticed and filed away in the growing catalog of small things about him that did not match the man she had decided he was.
“There is something you should know,” he said, “before we go in.”
Frances glanced at him. His profile was set in clean, severe lines, his gaze directed straight ahead.
