Page 14 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“Over the gate.”

“No.”

“Into the water trough.”

“Lieutenant.”

“In front of two hundred men.”

Mrs. Dalton covered her mouth with two fingers, though her eyes had begun to shine.

Ellen pressed a hand to the edge of the table. “He did not.”

“He did. And here is the part that makes him a great soldier, Ellen, mark it.”

Her name, spoken so easily, touched the room like a match to paper.

Vance continued, apparently unaware that he had just rearranged her entire morning. “He stood up out of that trough, streaming, with a lily pad on one shoulder, and he saluted. Held it. Made the whole parade hold it with him. Two hundred men at the salute to a colonel sitting in a horse trough, because what else, I put it to you, is a colonel to do?”

Ellen laughed before she meant to.

It came out bright and full, the sort of laugh she had not given the house in a fortnight. She heard how loud it was in the quiet room and found, to her astonishment, that she did not care. Let the hall hear it, and the old flowers, and the whole shabby house wake and remember that happiness had once known the way inside.

Vance watched her with such open pleasure that the laughter caught and softened in her throat.

“You will tell that badly to someone within the week,” he said, “and you will give me no credit for it.”

“I shall give you all the credit.”

“Shall you?”

“I shall say a very amusing officer told it to me.”

“A very amusing officer.” He placed a hand over his heart. “I am undone. Not handsome, not gallant, not dangerously compelling. Merely amusing.”

“You prefer dangerously compelling?”

“I prefer accuracy.”

Mrs. Dalton made a sound that might have been a cough and might have been laughter. “You prefer admiration, Lieutenant.”

“Madam, I am a soldier. Admiration is necessary to the uniform.”

“It is a pity punctuality was not issued with it.”

Ellen smiled down at the roses to hide how absurdly pleased she was. The room had become too bright, though the day outside remained grey. That was the trouble with Lieutenant Vance. He brought weather with him.

His voice lowered half a register. “You were painting, the last we spoke.”

Ellen’s fingers stilled.

“Watercolours,” he said. “Badly, you told me, which I took to mean rather well, since the people who truly do a thing badly are usually the last to admit it.”

He had remembered.

It came back to her whole, the way a scent does. May, and the Davenport ball, and the small breathless heat of too many candles, and the alcove behind the long blue curtain where she had gone to be unlooked at for the length of one cotillion. She had not heard him follow.

“You have the look of a woman hiding from someone in particular,” he had said, “and I should like to know whether it is me, so that I can be wounded properly.”