Page 37 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“So…how was it?” she said at last.
Annabelle gasped, her head snapping around to glare at her friend as her cheeks exploded into scorching fumes. “That…That is not?—”
Helena shook her head and said, “I am asking because I need to understand the scale of what you are dealing with.” She held Annabelle’s gaze steadily. “The answer is already on your face, so you may as well say it.”
Annabelle looked at the button on her coat that her fingers had apparently located without her knowledge, and were turning at the edge. She made them stop.
“Yes,” she said. “All right. Yes.”
Helena exhaled slowly through her nose and said nothing for a moment. Newton adjusted his weight in Annabelle’s lap and pressed against her palm, and she scratched behind his ears without looking at him.
“Right,” Helena said quietly. Then, after a moment: “I see.”
“You’re not going to say anything else?”
“I am composing myself.” She smoothed her skirt with both hands. “I have composed myself through worse shocks this season. The man in the toga. Lord Fenwick.” She paused, “I am composing myself rather more urgently now.”
“Helena—”
“I am fine.” She straightened. “I have composed myself.” She turned back to Annabelle with an expression that was, for about two seconds, very carefully controlled. Then she said, “The Duke of Silverford,” and then she said nothing further, because apparently even a fully composed Helena Thrupton required a moment to absorb certain categories of information.
“Yes,” Annabelle said. “I know.”
“I have to tell you something,” Helena said. “I need you to hear it before you decide how you feel.” She turned to face her on the bench. “His reputation is not drawing room talk. It is consistent, and it comes from women who have no reason to embroider it. Lady Somerton’s cousin, the one who married Viscount Hale, told me directly that he is discreet about it, but he’s made his rounds across every attractive widow, opera singer, actress and dancer in London.”
The willows moved slightly above them. Farther along the bank, the nursemaid had recovered the hoop.
“I know what he is,” Annabelle said.
“Then you know that whatever last night was for him…it is not something he has a map for.” Helena’s voice was even, without cruelty, in the way it was when she had decided a thing needed saying, too much to soften it. “I know I’ve been teasing you about this, but this… You’re my friend, and I want you to be safe. The Duke does not pursue unmarried women, to his credit. But that means he has no framework for this…and either it was nothing, a moment he’ll put away and not repeat, or it wasn’t nothing. And that,” she said, “is considerably worse. Because he still doesn’t stay.”
Annabelle looked at the water. A pair of mallards had appeared at the far bank, making their way east with no apparent urgency.
“Do you like him?” Helena said.
“That is not a relevant question.”
“I think it is very much the relevant question.”
Annabelle did not answer immediately. She watched the mallards reach the shadow of the far bank and disappear behind the reeds. Newton stirred in her lap and put his paw on her arm, as though to draw her back.
“I don’t know him,” she said, at last. “He is…not what I expected. But I don’t know him.” She turned the truth over carefully before she offered it. “I know that he cares about James, even when he is terrible at it. Above all… Heavens, he is Lucien’s closest friend,” Annabelle said. She had said it to herself since the early hours of the morning, and it had not lost its weight in repetition. “Lucien left London trusting that things were orderly. He trusted the house next door. He trusted me.” She felt the full shape of it settle. “If he ever found out?—”
“He won’t,” Helena said quietly.
“There is no version of this that ends well for me.” She said it plainly. “So, it does not happen again. That is the end of it.”
Helena looked at her for a long moment and then nodded once.
Annabelle lifted Newton off her lap, set him on the path, and stood. Helena rose beside her and handed over the leash without comment.
They turned back toward the main circuit. Newton led from the front, tail up, at his habitual pace. The grey light was the same as it had been an hour ago, flat and cold over the water. The park looked entirely unchanged. The world continued its indifference at a comfortable volume.
They walked without talking for a while, and this was a different silence from the one they had walked in on the way out. It was the silence of two people who had said everything that neededsaying and had arrived at the other side of it, and Helena kept pace without comment, and Annabelle was glad of her for it.
Annabelle kept her eyes on Newton and thought about the letter she owed her aunt, the new planting book she had ordered that had not yet arrived, and whether the third-floor linen press had been properly aired.
None of it held.
