Page 27 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
But she had smiled. And he had felt something crack open in his chest that he had spent twelve years keeping shut, and he did not know how to close it again.
He closed his eyes. He would not sleep. He never slept well in new places. But he lay still and breathed and let the quiet settle around him. In the dark behind his eyes, he saw her face, rain on her cheeks, her chin up, her blue eyes steady on his.
He thought about the way she had held his gaze in the entrance hall when every other person had taken a step back. He thought about the way she stuck out her hand like a man. He thought about the riddles in the gazebo, and the way she laughed, real and startled, and the look on her face when she told him about three years of silence.
He thought about what she had said before he had carried her to the gazebo.
“How would you treat your wife and the people who work for you?”
Nobody had ever asked him that. Not in twelve years of service. Not at Court. Not in any of the rooms where men decided the fate of nations.
The question assumed he was capable of gentleness, which was either brave or foolish of her, and he was not sure which was the case.
He had told her the truth—respect. He had not planned to say it. It came out because she asked him plainly, and he was too tired to lie, and the rain was loud enough to mask any mistakes, and she was warm in his arms and looking at him with those blue eyes, and he had simply had enough of pretending.
He thought about Gordon Hansley, a man he had never met and would never meet. A man who had starved his wife and locked her in her rooms and controlled her meals and her letters and her laughter.
Edward had killed men for less. He had killed men for much less. The Crown had asked him to, and he had done it, and he had not lost sleep over most of them.
He would not have lost sleep over Gordon Hansley.
I will not ruin this.Whatever this is. I will not ruin it.
He lay there for a long time. The house creaked around him. Footsteps sounded in the corridor. A door closed somewhere.They were the sounds of a house full of people settling in for the night.
Somewhere below, he heard laughter. A woman’s voice, then another. Valeria, maybe. Or her sister. He could not tell from this distance. But the sound, warm and unguarded, drifted up through the floorboards and settled in the room with him.
CHAPTER 9
Caroline was waiting for her.
Valeria had barely made it through the sitting room door before her sister was on her, hands cupping her face, turning her head left and right, checking for cuts and bruises, anything that might justify the state she was in. Her hair was still damp. Her dress was ruined. She smelled of rain and woodsmoke and warmth from being held against Edward’s chest.
“I am fine,” she said, for the third time.
“You are not fine. You are soaking wet. You have been gone for hours, and nobody knew where you were.” Caroline pressed both hands to her belly. The baby was clearly very active in there. She winced and straightened carefully. “How on earth did you end up with the Hound?”
“He found me in the maze. Nobody else came.”
“Nobody?”
“Not one.” Valeria sat down and pulled the blanket Caroline offered around her shoulders. “It rained. He carried me to the gazebo, and we waited it out.”
Caroline looked at her. She had their mother’s eyes. Dark and steady and capable of seeing through walls.
Valeria had always envied that about her. Caroline was the youngest of the five Hughes children and somehow the most perceptive of all of them. She noticed things that other people missed. She noticed when John was lying about where he had been the night before. She noticed when Evan was angry but pretending not to be. She noticed when their father was worried and trying to hide it behind his newspaper and his smoking pipe. She noticed the exact shade of red Valeria’s neck turned when she was embarrassed and could distinguish it from the red that came from the cold.
She was noticing now. Valeria could feel Caroline’s gaze trailing over her face like fingers, reading her, cataloging the flush in her cheeks and the brightness in her eyes and the way she was not looking directly at her, which was always a tell.
Valeria had never been able to lie to her sister. Not once. Not even about small things. Caroline had a talent for seeing through people that would have made her an excellent spy if the Crown had recruited pregnant women with opinions about tablecloths.
“And?” Caroline prompted.
“And nothing. We talked, then he brought me back.”
“You talked.”
“Yes.”
