Page 19 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Ellen lowered her hand. “Do they?”

“They do.”

“How fortunate.”

“Exceedingly.” Mrs. Dalton returned to the writing table and opened the address book. “You may wish to put that rose in the jug before it expires of neglect.”

Ellen looked down. She was still holding one rose by the stem.

“Oh.”

“Indeed.”

Ellen placed it in the blue jug, entirely in the wrong position, and found herself smiling at it as though the poor bruised thing had done something charming.

She thought of Charlotte Whittaker.

Charlotte had wedded last month. A widower of three-and-sixty, with a good house, bad teeth, and a daughter older than the bride. Charlotte had cried at her own betrothal breakfast, openly into the eggs, while all the women present pretended not to see and all the men present became fascinated by toast. Afterward, in the carriage, Charlotte had sat with her hands folded and her face white and still, like a small animal being carried to the surgeon, knowing the direction and unable to do anything about it.

Ellen touched the place on her glove where Vance’s thumb had rested.

“Thank Goodness,” she whispered.

Mrs. Dalton looked up. “What was that, my dear?”

Ellen smiled down at the roses. “Nothing, Cousin.”

It was not nothing at all, whatever she had told Mrs. Dalton.

It was everything.

She was not her dear friend Charlotte, being carried away to a man whose name chilled the breakfast table and made every woman present suddenly grateful for her own condition. Ellen was the luckiest girl in London, and no one in London knew it, and she had him.

***

The street door slammed.

The sound came too hard and at entirely the wrong hour. Ellen set down the teacup she had only just lifted, so carefully that the china barely spoke against the saucer, and stood in the middle of the carpet listening as the house seemed to gather itself around the disturbance. The boot heels coming down the hall were not the footman’s borrowed, uneven tread, and they were not Vance’s step either, which some foolish part of her thought she might have known blindfolded and half asleep.

The morning-room door opened without a knock.

Henry stood in the doorway, white to the lips.

He was not drunk, which made it worse, because drink was a form of trouble Ellen understood. He had been crying and had not washed his face, and there was a wildness about his eyes that she had seen on him only once before, on the morning their father died.

“Henry,” she said, moving one hand to the back of the nearest chair, though she did not remember deciding to steady herself. “Whatever is the matter?”

He looked at the roses first. Then at the color Vance had left in her cheeks. Something passed over his countenance and vanished so quickly that, had she cherished him less, she might have missed it.

“Ellen,” he said, and his voice made a poor attempt at ordinary news. “I have to tell you something.”

“Then tell it,” she replied, and the calmness of her own voice frightened her more than Henry’s entrance had done.

He came two steps into the room and stopped, as though the carpet had become a boundary he could not quite cross. “I have been to see the Duke of Rosanne.”

“The Duke of Rosanne?” Ellen repeated, watching his hands flex at his sides. “Why would you go to him?”

Henry drew in a breath and forced the words out quickly, all together, the way a man pulls a splinter before courage can fail him. “He will settle the debts. All of them. And you are to enter into matrimony with him. In three weeks.”