Page 3 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“Then we must get you more immediately.” He glanced past her shoulder again. This time Louisa’s curiosity was far too strong for her to ignore it. She turned.

Three women advanced toward them across the ballroom with focused, unblinking determination. Each wore the fixed, brilliant smile of maternal ambition, and each had a young lady trailing in her wake: gowns immaculate, spines rigid, expressions arranged into studied combinations of modesty and availability.

Louisa turned back to the Duke.

His expression had not changed. The smile remained. The posture remained. But his knuckles, she noticed, had gone white where his hands were folded in front of his stomach.

“Your Grace,” she said slowly. “Are you using me as a shield?”

His gaze snapped to hers. For a moment, the mask slipped. Surprise flickered across his features, followed by a swift, grudging respect that looked almost like admiration.

“That,” he said, “is a deeply unflattering accusation.”

“That is not a denial.”

He studied her. The advancing mothers drew closer. Somewhere behind her, Louisa could hear the rustle of silk picking up speed.

“If I were hypothetically using you as a shield,” he said carefully, “it would be a compliment. You are precisely the sort of person one wishes to hide behind. Calm. Unassuming. Unlikely to draw further attention.”

“You are describing a hedge.”

Another laugh. This one cost him his composure entirely. He pressed his fingers to his mouth and turned his face away, shoulders shaking, and Louisa felt a strange, warm flush of triumph.

The mothers had arrived.

“Your Grace!” Lady Blackwood materialized at his right, three decades of strategic social maneuvering evident in every calculated step. “What a delight to find you here this evening. May I present my daughter, Miss Blackwood? She is newly returned from Bath and quite accomplished in watercolors.”

Miss Blackwood curtsied. Oliver bowed. His smile was back, impeccable and impenetrable, and Louisa watched the transformation with quiet fascination. The man who had laughed with his hand over his mouth thirty seconds ago had vanished entirely. In his place stood the Duke of Ashford: gracious, smooth, every inch the charming bachelor that London’s marriage market could not stop pursuing.

He was very good at it. And he was miserable.

She could see it in the set of his jaw. In the way his weight shifted to the balls of his feet. In the micro-second of blankness that crossed his face between each new introduction before the smile settled back into place.

She set her lemonade on the nearest surface and stepped back. There was no reason to stay. The Duke had his evening. She had hers. Their collision was an accident of proximity and terrible Bancroft furniture placement, and she would think nothing more of it.

“Thank you for catching my drink, Your Grace,” she said quietly, dipping a curtsy that he could not possibly notice amid the siege of debutantes and their determined mothers. “I hope you survive the evening.”

She turned and walked away.

The crowd swallowed her in three steps. The music resumed its relentless cheerfulness. Eleanor would be looking for her. Frederick was still laughing with Miss Cavendish near the orchestra. The Season stretched ahead of her, endless and predictable, and Louisa Fairchild tucked herself back into the corner of the Bancroft ballroom where she had started the evening, and told herself that the brief, bright warmth in her chest meant nothing at all.

* * *

Oliver Sinclair watched her go.

He was still half-trapped in conversation with Lady Blackwood, whose monologue about her daughter’s watercolors had reached a level of detail that bordered on punitive, but his eyes tracked the retreating figure across the ballroom. The soft brown hair. The pale blue gown, modest and slightly out of fashion and entirely wrong for the season’s preferred silhouette. The quiet, unhurried way she moved through the crowd, apologising to no one, seeking no one’s attention, disappearing into the mass of silk and candlelight without a ripple.

She had called herself a hedge, and he’d laughed before he could catch it because the self-deprecation had been so swift and so precise that it slipped beneath his guard entirely. Women did not speak to him that way. Women spoke to him in calculated pleasantries and rehearsed flattery and the careful, coded language of ambition dressed in lace. They wanted his title, his fortune, his attention, his ring. They wanted what he represented. Not one of them had ever looked at him with that steady, dry-eyed gaze and accused him of hiding behind her.

“...and of course her needlework has been praised by Lady Whitfield herself, which I am sure Your Grace will agree is no small accomplishment”

“Indeed,” Oliver said, without hearing a word of it. “Most impressive.”

Miss Blackwood smiled prettily and said nothing of substance and looked at him with blank, hopeful patience. Told her watercolors were her greatest asset, and she had believed it. He felt the old familiar tightness in his chest. The one that arrived every Season, reliable as rain, whenever he stood in a ballroom and felt the walls press closer.

Sebastian would laugh at him. Sebastian always laughed at him when the matchmaking mothers descended. You chose this, he would say, pouring another drink at White’s. You could end it tomorrow with a single proposal. Pick anyone. They’d all say yes.

That was the trouble, of course. They would all say yes. Every last one. And not a single yes would have anything to do with him.