Page 1 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Chapter One
“The noise won’t follow you inside.”
It was, Dominic reflected, the least convincing claim he had made in recent memory.
The double doors of Fairmont House stood ahead of them, and the sounds of the gathering pressed through them regardless: voices overlapping voices, laughter with too much wine in it, the distant scrape of chairs, and a thread of music that started, stopped, began again.
A married couple swept past them up the steps without a glance.
But James, his nephew, had not moved.
He had his mother’s dark hair and eyes—nothing of the Barrow coloring—and Miss Hartley had pressed his coat to a crispness that had survived the carriage ride from Silverford House. Now, he was watching the doors the way he watched most thingsthat alarmed him: with the concentrated attention of someone calculating exactly how much danger an unfamiliar thing might present.
Dominic crouched to the boy’s level, lowering his voice beneath the passing conversations.
“Lucien is a friend of long standing. His household is orderly. These people will not require anything of you beyond your presence.”
“It’s loud,” James said, but did not look at Dominic when he said it.
His attention had fixed on a woman near the railing who was laughing at something; a bright, carrying laugh that wanted a crowd to sustain itself.
Dominic refrained from sighing aloud. Perhaps it was impossible to cozen the child, so it would do him better to just tell the truth here. So, he said, “It will be louder inside. That is simply the nature of such evenings.”
James absorbed this with no visible appreciation for the honesty. “Then I don’t want to go in.” He sounded as though he were skirting the edges of petulance but couldn’t quite fall right in.
For that, Dominic thought, he must be doing something right with the boy.
“I understand that.” He kept his voice even. “You will not be required to speak at length with anyone you would rather not. Miss Hartley will stay with you. All that is asked of you is to be present. You cannot avoid these situations indefinitely. Society will be here regardless of whether you choose to meet it.”
That came out harder than he had intended. James’s shoulders drew up slightly. He was still watching the woman by the railing, as though if he didn’t look at Dominic, the comment might not have been directed at him.
“An hour,” Dominic said. “Perhaps a little more.”
James said nothing for a beat, then he nodded once.
Dominic straightened, making sure to keep his relief from showing on his face, and placed a brief hand at the boy’s back; enough to guide without pressing, and they went inside.
The ballroom held upwards of two hundred guests at a conservative estimate, and was therefore already warm, over-lit, and producing the level of noise Dominic had not promised James would follow them in. Dominic made sure to keep his expression bone straight.
The musicians in the far corner had committed to a brisk tempo. Chandeliers threw candlelight across silk and jewels in equal measure, and two hundred guests performed the social arithmetic of a ton event in full motion: the considered smile, the weighed glance, the conversation that was never entirely about the thing it appeared to be about.
Dominic moved through it the way he had moved through such rooms for the better part of a decade, with a version of ease he had maintained long enough that it required no conscious effort. He acknowledged acquaintances in passing, paused where politeness required it, and kept James in his peripheral view throughout.
The boy pressed close to his side, eyes down, mouth flat, and endured. Miss Hartley maintained her appointed distance behind them.
He found Lucien Stanton near the center of the room, deep in conversation that soon paused with visible relief at the arrival of a different subject. Beside him, his wife Elinor was composed, with dark eyes that moved through a room and collected everything worth knowing before she spoke a word.
“Dominic.” Stanton extended his hand with genuine warmth. “You actually came.”
“Of course I did. You’re my best friend.” Dominic glanced down to find James had pressed somewhat closer at his side, examining the floor with studied attention. “Lucien, Elinor, this is James. My nephew. Son of my first cousin Graham.”
Neither of them bore down on the boy with the theatrical warmth that adults often inflicted on children they did not know.
Elinor crouched quite naturally to something near his eye level and said, “Good day, James. I’m Elinor. It’s lovely to meet you, James.”
James’s gaze lifted from the floor for a brief moment, then quickly returned.
Dominic knew this was rather more engagement than most people had managed in the past month.
