Page 66 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“He allows the creature to do as he likes, he is quite willful. I daresay Percy has dreadful taste in everything except company, apparently.”

“He has excellent taste,” Anna said, scooping Percy up with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance, and the cat settled against her shoulder, purring louder, entirely unbothered by the silk or the company or anything at all beyond the fact that he had found his preferred lap, or, in this case, the nearest available substitute. “Don’t you, you ridiculous feline?”

Frederick, watching from across the room, found he could not entirely disagree with the cat’s judgment.

If he was being honest with himself, he was a bit jealous of the thing.

He made his way over in the end, as he supposed he had known he would from the moment Percy made his choice. It was his cat, and therefore his responsibility, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Anna looked entirely at home with Percy draped across her shoulder and her evening gloves ruined at the fingers from the enthusiastic scratching, laughing at something Rachel had said while Lord Pemberton retreated in evident bafflement.

“He isn’t usually so forthcoming with guests,” Frederick said, coming to stand beside her.

“He was fond of me. I am not just some casual guest after all.” Anna glanced up, and something shifted in her face, not quite guarded but careful. “I hoped he might not have entirely forgotten me.”

“Percy forgets very little. He is particular, but not inconstant.”

She looked at him for a moment, and he had the uncomfortable sense that the remark had landed somewhere other than he’d intended it.

“How reassuring,” she said, pleasantly, and turned back to Percy, scratching behind his ears.

“Percy.” Frederick reached to extract him from the immediate vicinity of her coiffure, which she could not likely repair at a dinner party, and his hand came close enough to her hair to brush it. He did so barely, the softest graze of knuckles against the golden loops near her temple, and he drew back as though he’d touched something hot. “I beg your pardon, my lady.”

“It’s quite all right.” Her voice was steady. “He can have the hair. I’ve rather given up on it surviving the evening.”

Percy, divested from his investigation by Frederick’s intervention, made his opinion of this known by fixing Frederick with a long, deeply unimpressed look before bunting his head deliberately back against Anna’s jaw and resuming his purring at increased volume.

“He has your measure, I’m afraid,” Anna told Frederick, with a ghost of amusement.

Frederick was spared having to formulate a response by the arrival of the guests’ carriages being announced, and the comfortable hum of the party beginning to dissolve into farewells.

He was obliged to look rather fixedly out the window for a moment before he could master his own expression sufficiently to see anyone off at the door.

CHAPTER 25

“Well, well, well,” Thomas said as he dropped into the chair opposite without waiting for an invitation. “You look like a man who’s lost a fortune at cards.”

“I can’t remember the last time I was at a card table,” Frederick retorted dryly.

The brandy at White’s was good, and Frederick had resolved, somewhere around his third glass, to take advantage of it.

It is not an admission of anything. A Duke might drink in his club on a Tuesday evening for any number of perfectly ordinary reasons, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with pale rose silk, or a laugh that had been dispensed to another man.

“Fair enough.” Thomas signaled for his own glass and settled into his seat with the clear intention of staying a while. This scowl you're wearing is most interesting, then.”

“I am anything but interesting.”

“Well, I have aninterestingquestion, and wonder if you might satisfy my curiosity on a small matter…”

“What?”

“So… The widowed Lady Birchall is back in town.”

Frederick’s hand went very still around his empty glass. “She is.”

“Goodness, I hate using that name… and it’s a good thing I understand she’s come up for the Season properly this time. Looking for a husband, from what I gathered at your dinner party.”

“You gathered that?” Fredrick said, his voice sharp as he signaled for another drink.

Thomas grinned, ignoring the question and feigning ignorance of the tightness that had settled across Frederick’s shoulders. “Is it true, then? She means to marry this Season?”