Page 73 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Sebastian disappeared into the crowd. Oliver remained against the pillar. Across the room, Frederick guided Louisa toward the refreshment table, his hand hovering at the small of her back.

Oliver pulled at his cravat, loosened the knot a fraction. The crowd pressed around him, voices rising, laughter sharpening, the noise building toward the pitch that transformed every London gathering into a competition between those who wished to be heard and those who wished to escape.

He watched Frederick offer Louisa a glass of cordial. She took it. Their fingers did not touch during the exchange. Frederick spoke, and Louisa responded with that careful, practiced brightness Oliver had built for her, piece by piece, in parks and drawing rooms and carriage rides, never once imagining that watching another man benefit from it would feel like swallowing glass.

Louisa excused herself from Frederick’s side. Oliver saw the moment happen: her hand touching his sleeve, a word, a nod, then she turned and moved toward the far door that led to the corridor. Frederick let her go without following. He was already turning back toward Lord Ashton, resuming a conversation about a horse or a hunt or whatever occupied the narrow bandwidth of his interests.

Oliver watched her disappear through the door. The green of her dress flickered in the gap, then was gone.

He waited. He was not following her. He was standing against a pillar, watching the door she had left through, waiting for her to return, which was not the same thing at all.

The tenor returned to the makeshift stage. Lady Hathaway clapped her hands and urged guests toward their seats. The second half was beginning. The crowd shifted again, chairs scraped, voices lowered. The far door remained closed.

One minute passed, then two. The tenor launched into his next piece, an aria Oliver could not name, delivered with the trembling conviction that volume could substitute for pitch. Three minutes gone and the door stayed shut.

Oliver set down his glass and crossed the room.

The corridor beyond the drawing rooms was narrow, papered in dark blue, lit by two oil lamps that threw pools of amber light across the runner. The noise from the musicale dulled to a murmur the moment the door closed behind him. Cooler air moved against his face. He could hear his own footsteps on the carpet.

He heard her voice before he saw her.

“Please let me pass.”

Quiet and controlled, but threaded through with a tightness that stopped him mid-stride.

“I only want a moment of your time, Miss Fairchild. Surely you can spare a moment.”

The second voice was male, thickened, its consonants softened by drink. Oliver knew the sound. He had grown up around men whose charm curdled after the third glass, whose civility thinned to a membrane stretched over appetites they no longer cared to disguise.

He turned the corner.

The corridor widened into an alcove where a narrow table held a vase of lilies. Louisa stood with her back near the wall, her chin raised, her shoulders squared. A man stood in front of her, blocking the passage back toward the drawing rooms. Oliver recognized him: Sir Edmund Dacre, a baronet of middling reputation and considerable inherited debt, the sort of man who survived each Season on charm, credit, and a willingness to laugh at other men’s jokes.

Dacre’s coat was unbuttoned. His cravat hung loose. He stood close enough that Louisa had nowhere to retreat, and his right hand was extended, fingers closed around her wrist.

“You are hurting me,” Louisa said. She did not raise her voice. She held herself still, composed, the way a person holds still when movement might provoke.

Oliver knew that stillness. He had spent his childhood watching it. He had watched his mother stand exactly that way beside a dining table, beside a study door, beside a fireplace, her body rigid, her voice flattened to a surface that offered no edge for anger to grip.

The corridor shrank to the width of Dacre’s hand on Louisa’s wrist.

“I mean nothing by it.” Dacre’s thumb shifted against her skin. His smile was loose, wet. “Only a bit of conversation. A pretty girl should not be wandering corridors alone.”

“Remove your hand.”

Oliver’s voice came out low and perfectly even. He heard it from a distance, as though it belonged to a man standing behind him. Dacre turned. Louisa’s eyes found Oliver’s face, and he saw the relief that flashed through them before she had time to suppress it.

“Ashford.” Dacre released Louisa’s wrist and took a half-step back. The smile widened, rearranged itself into the shape of bonhomie, the practised recovery of someone who understood rank. “I was only keeping Miss Fairchild company. No harm done.”

Oliver looked at Louisa’s wrist. The skin where Dacre had gripped her was white, compressed, the blood returning in a flush that spread across the tendons. Her fingers curled inward, instinctive, shielding the mark.

He looked at Dacre.

Nine years. Nine years of patience, of discipline, of building himself into a man his mother would have recognised and loved. Nine years of sitting in his father’s chair without becoming his father, of governing estates without governing through fear, of holding his temper behind the smile that cost him more than anyone in his life had ever understood.

He seized Dacre by the front of his coat.

The motion was fluid, weightless, a single movement that began in his shoulder and ended with Dacre’s back against the corridor wall. The vase of lilies rattled on the table. A stem fell, landed on the carpet, lay there in a puddle of scattered water.