Page 70 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
The door clicked shut.
The house settled around the sound of it.
Annabelle stood in the entrance hall of Silverford House, which was hers now, hers along with the furnishings and the walls and the locked room at the end of the east wing, and she turned, because she heard footsteps behind her, and Dominic was there.
His coat was still on. His cravat had come slightly loose over the afternoon, and the piece of hair at his right temple had not been fixed at any point in the day. He was looking at her the same way he had looked at her in the church, and at breakfast, and across every room she had been aware of him in since morning. He had not looked away from her first, all day.
“I have been trying,” he said, “to find the right time to say something to you…since this morning.”
She looked at him, at the way his eyes shifted inside their sockets, at his unwillingness to look her right in the face. The entrance hall was warm, and he was four feet away.
Ask him. Ask him now.
“Then say it.”
Chapter Twenty-One
He drew a breath. “I want—” he said.
But before he could say anything more, the door from the service corridor opened.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Howell stepped into the hall with her hands folded. “I beg your pardon. I only wished to confirm that Her Grace’s apartments are in readiness, whenever she wishes to be shown up.”
Dominic looked at the housekeeper. His eyes did not come back to Annabelle.
“Now,” he said. “Show Her Grace upstairs.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“And I’ll be in my study.” He said this to Mrs. Howell as well, and then he turned and crossed the hall toward the east corridor, and Annabelle watched the corner receive him and give nothing back.
The moment was effectively broken. She might never get him to tell her the words he’d just been about to say.
She followed Mrs. Howell up the stairs, deciding to store away those thoughts and focus on what was right in front of her.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Howell said, opening a door, and the title made her flinch.
Of course, she had watched herself being entered into the register that morning and seen her name there in the vicar’s hand; she had understood, in the procedural way of ceremonies, what was now true. But standing in an entrance hall with a man who had said two words and then walked away had a way of making the truth feel less settled than the ink suggested.
The duchess’s apartments were at the far end of the first floor, opposite the wing Dominic occupied.
Mrs. Howell opened the door and stood aside, and Annabelle stepped into a room that was large and tastefully furnished and contained, she observed at once, no personal objects of any kind. Cream walls, gold drapes, a writing desk by the window,empty of everything. A room maintained for use and never quite inhabited.
Her trunk had arrived ahead of her, open near the dressing room door. A young woman was bent over it and straightened at once when they entered.
“Your Grace.” A quick curtsy. “I’m Ruth, your lady’s maid. Mrs. Howell and I have been seeing to the arrangements.”
Annabelle had met Ruth briefly that morning, in the press of final preparations at Fairmont House; there had been too much else to manage for more than an exchange of names. She had a purposeful quality about her, attentive without hovering, and Annabelle was glad of it.
“Thank you, Ruth,” she said. “I won’t need much this evening.”
Mrs. Howell withdrew with a curtsy. Ruth went back to the trunk. Annabelle went to the window.
The street below was the same she had looked out at for months from the house next door, from a slightly different angle.
One of Lucien’s sitting room windows was still lit.
She found James by sound before she found him by sight: a flat, patient voice drifting from behind the library door. “…and thisone is about wars, and this one is about ships. I think this one may be about both, because the picture has cannons on a ship.”
