Page 33 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

The gentleman’s smile deepened, as though Theodore had complimented him rather than warned him. He turned fully to Ellen and bowed again, this time with more softness and no more sincerity.

“You will be at Wrenfield for the shooting, I expect, Your Grace.”

Ellen felt Theodore’s hand become still at her back.

“I am newly wedded, my lord,” she said carefully. “I am told very little with certainty.”

The gentleman looked pleased by the answer. “Then allow me to supply one certainty. We are very nearly neighbors, you and I. My own poor acres sit just across the river from your husband’s little cottage.”

Theodore’s voice remained perfectly courteous. “Greaves.”

The earl let the word cottage rest a moment before continuing. “I have always found it charming that a man with Lockton to his name keeps a cottage of thirty rooms by way of modesty.”

Ellen turned the name over silently.

Greaves.

Theodore’s tone did not change by so much as a hair, and the courtesy of it was complete enough to close over the conversation like a lid. “My acreage does very well without being thought of. We will not keep you from the tables.”

Greaves smiled as though something had been confirmed rather than refused. “As you wish. One must never keep a gentleman from his game, especially when he has already won so handsomely.”

His eyes touched Ellen again.

“Your Grace.”

The bow he gave her was soft, polished, and empty. Then he withdrew into the crowd in the way of water receding, leaving the place where he had stood looking exactly as before.

Ellen waited until he was far enough away that no one could pretend to overhear.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“The Earl of Greaves,” Theodore said. “A political acquaintance.”

“Political acquaintances do not usually make a room colder by entering it.”

His eyes moved to her then, briefly. “You have been observing.”

“I have had little else to do.”

The words came out before she could make them gentler.

Theodore accepted them without visible injury. “Greaves is not a man with whom you need concern yourself.”

“That is a very careful sentence.”

“It is a sufficient one.”

“For you, perhaps.”

His gaze remained steady. “For tonight.”

The flatness of it was its own instruction, a door closed quietly in her face. Ellen understood that the subject was not to be opened, and she filed the name away in the growing drawer of things her husband would not explain to her, beside the door he would not open, the warmth he would not spend, and the violets she still had not decided how to understand.

She was looking away from him, across the room, when she saw the red coat.

The red coat stood at the far side of the room, half-turned from her, a militia officer in conversation with two other gentlemen. The set of his shoulders was exactly right, and the dark hair above the collar was exactly right, and for one violent instant Ellen’s heart rose into her throat with such force that the room seemed to tilt away from her.

Her hand closed hard on Theodore’s sleeve before she knew it had moved.