Page 31 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“Do not let him make you colder than you are.”

Ellen turned from the mirror. “I do not think he tries to make me anything.”

“That may be the trouble.”

***

Theodore was in the hall when they came down.

He looked up at the stairs, and Ellen felt the glance travel over the gown before it returned to her face. It was no more than a moment. He did not stare. He did not smile. Whatever moved behind his eyes came and went without reaching the rest of him.

“You are ready,” he said.

Ellen’s fingers tightened on the banister before she released it. “I believe so, Your Grace.”

Augusta descended behind her with an audible little breath that might have been disapproval or only age.

Theodore offered his arm. “Then we should go.”

Ellen placed her gloved hand on his sleeve and thought that a man might have found one warmer word in the whole of the English language if he had cared to look for it.

“Your Grace,” Augusta said from behind them.

Theodore glanced back. “Aunt?”

“She looks very well.”

His eyes returned to Ellen. For one suspended instant, she thought he might answer as a husband. Then his face closed again with that practiced composure that made her feel as though she had reached for a door and found only painted wood.

“Yes,” he said evenly. “She does.”

It ought to have been praise.

Somehow, from him, it sounded like a fact entered into a ledger.

***

The whispers found her inside the first half hour.

They were not meant to be heard, which was the cruelty of them, since a thing not meant to be heard could not be answered without making oneself ridiculous. Ellen caught them in pieces as Theodore steered her through the rooms, one gloved hand at the small of her back, steady and unhurried.

“That is the new duchess,” a woman’s voice murmured near a bank of flowers. “The Middleton girl.”

“Bought with the brother’s debts, every penny of it,” another replied, and the little laugh that followed seemed to slide beneath Ellen’s skin.

A gentleman answered in a tone of idle amusement. “They say the brother lost twenty thousand at faro. Rosanne must have wanted an heir very badly indeed.”

“Or a wife very cheaply.”

“She is a pretty enough thing at ten paces,” the first woman said. “Look closer. There is nothing there.”

Ellen kept her face exactly as it was.

She had learned that face over two years of creditors and cut acquaintance, the face that gave a room nothing. She wore it now as carefully as Augusta had arranged the curl at her temple and let the pieces slide off it.

Theodore’s hand remained at her back.

It did not press or caress. It was simply there.