Page 43 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“No.” He found his wallet. He counted her full fee and placed it on the sideboard. Then he counted the same amount again and set it beside the first. “For the inconvenience.”
She looked at the money, then at him, her gaze fleeting through a cycle of emotions, most of them muddied with knowing that he did not want to understand.
She only nodded.
He collected his hat from the chair by the door and said his goodnight.
The air outside hit him cold and clean, and he walked home.
The night had gone considerably chillier, or he had; it was difficult to determine which.
As he turned through the gates of Silverford House, he looked at the house next door without meaning to and then turned away.
The windows of Fairmont House were dark. Every last one.
The night butler took his coat and gloves and was handing them to a footman when he cleared his throat once.
“A note arrived this afternoon, Your Grace. Lord Keldwick left it himself. He said it was for your personal attention.”
He took the folded card and went upstairs. He opened it at his writing desk, under the lamp. Miles’s hand was his usual: slanted, rapid, constitutionally incapable of restraint.
Forgot to mention at the club. A name for you: Albrey Whitmore, Viscount Chesham. He left his card at Fairmont House this afternoon; I confirmed it at Mrs. Laing’s supper. I will not explain further. He has been asking after Lady Annabelle since the masquerade. Well-connected, good income. Unremarkable on all fronts, but unoffensive enough.
I thought you would want to know. Or possibly you’d have preferred not to. Either way.
— M
Dominic read it twice.
He set it face down on the desk. The lamp was burning low, and he did not turn it up. He sat in the dark and the quiet, the fire in the grate down to a slow red burn, the street below entirely still, the house above entirely still, and the note under his hand face-down so that he did not need to read it a third time.
Unremarkable, Miles had written. But inoffensive.
He had spent the evening failing to stop thinking about a woman he was under every obligation not to pursue. He had gone to a brothel for the first time in the better part of a year, and it had been no use, and the reason it had been no use was not complicated: it was the simplest and most inconvenient thing imaginable. And he had come home to this.
He turned the note back over.
He has been asking after Lady Annabelle since the masquerade.
And he set it down again.
But he could not sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
“Silverford didn’t come,” Helena said, not quite to anyone, into the mouth of her champagne glass.
“A great many people didn’t come,” Annabelle said. “It is a large city.”
“True.” She sipped. “And yet you have been watching the same corner of the entrance for the past quarter hour.”
Annabelle picked up her own glass and did not answer that.
Their box at Vauxhall looked out over the Grand Cross Walk, and from the railing she could see the lantern-lit crowd moving in both directions: dark coats and pale gowns, the odd cloak catching the light, the distant orchestra sending its melody from the rotunda in a long, bright thread.
Lady Rosenhall sat at the back of the box, back straight, hands folded in her lap, her gaze moving from the promenade to the opposite boxes and back.
The entrance was to the north. Annabelle turned toward the orchestra.
