Page 5 of The Runaway Duchess

“Fresh ingredients.” He chuckled. “Fresh. Ingredients.”

More clapping. Snuffles of laughter.

“Ho, is that the secret? These days, I wouldn’t know.” Browning sighed with mock envy. “Well, get to it, you scalawag. Don’t you have a train to catch?”

Cranbrook drained his glass of champagne.

“Indeed. But if we miss it, we’ll go tomorrow. You can’t rush the first time. It’s when a man makes his mark.”

Browning was laughing again.

“Soften the wax,” he crowed. “Press the seal down hard. No wiggling. Eh, Cranbrook?”

Her heart didn’t change its rhythm as she stole away. But the beats sounded darker. Doom-doom. Doom-doom.

Her heart was still beating darkly. Doom-doom. Doom-doom.

Tonight, Cranbrook would claim what he’d been denied. And he would discover himself deceived.

Her gorge rose. Pure panic. No way to purge it.

“That’s not ours.” The father had climbed over the side of the wagonette to wave away the porters, a trunk suspended between them.

“Oh.” Before she could think, she’d darted forward. “Oh, that’s mine.”

The porters sidled toward her and lowered the trunk to the ground. Tears sprang to her eyes. Her trunk. The one piece of luggage that didn’t bear the Cranbrook coronet. Dear God, it had almost been lost, and with it the gowns she’d worn in happier times, her diaries, her notebooks, her albums and fashion magazines. Home. She wanted to throw her arms around it, greet it like an old friend.

“Sorry about the mix-up,” said the father, unnecessarily. No fault of his. But she nodded at his courtesy. He was blond, with an extravagant mustache, his clothing neat, his expression cheerful. His eyes skipped tactfully over her face as he smiled at the middle distance. A Londoner, a banker or stock dabbler, she’d wager, with a Cornish wife and a large, young family. Off to visit the country cousins. She’d always enjoyed embellishing upon observable reality, scribbling her fancies in those packed-away notebooks. This family seemed to have stepped from the pages of a storybook about jolly summer adventures. More children kept tumbling out from between the trees, boys and girls, both sexes armed with sticks that they clattered together with alarming ferocity.

“Surrender!” The command rang out again and again as the melee approached the station house, followed by the inevitable chorus.

“Never!”

Lavinia’s lips curved, tugging the little blisters. Smiling hurt.

“Time to go.” The father began to wrangle his progeny, grabbing at the ones who rampaged too close. “All of you. Even Admiral Nelson.”

The smallest girl threw down her stick in disgust. After many more shouts, no surrenders, and one tragic death performed in several heroic stages, they’d all packed into the flies and the cabmen were whipping the horses. The flies rolled away from the station, and Lavinia let loose the breath she’d been holding. She felt emptied out. A profound loneliness, akin to a more uncanny feeling.

Inexistence.

She was no longer Miss Lavinia Yardley. But she wasn’t—couldn’t be—the Duchess of Cranbrook.

The crowd on the platform had thinned. She bent down to lay a hand on the trunk’s lid. How silly she was. Trying to derive comfort from a leather box. She should stand up straight. Summon the porters. Walk back across the footbridge. Cranbrook—Peter, he’d told her to call him, her husband—awaited. She laid her other hand on the trunk. She closed her eyes.

“Mrs. Pendrake?”

Her eyes opened and she rose, dusting her gloves. Another rustic, this one approaching at an alarming clip. He wasn’t smocked, but his brown canvas hunting jacket flapped open, and she could see his shirt, the collar flopping, tied loosely with an olive-green scarf.

He’d emerged—like the boys and girls—from between the trees. Did Cornish woods possess some strange power to multiply children and produce men out of thin air?

“I’ve kept you waiting. The train’s always late, but then . . .” The rustic slowed as he drew up beside her. “I was later,” he finished, ingeniously. He dropped his bags, shook his hair from his eyes. His chest rose and fell, but he didn’t sound remotely out of breath. Or, for that matter, overly repentant. Strong hands gripped hers.

“Mrs. Pendrake,” he said with unaffected warmth. “I am delighted to meet you.”

He wasn’t Cornish, not by his accent. But no young gentleman from town would tramp about hatless, in a canvas jacket. Nor had any gentlemen from town ever met her gaze with such . . . levelness. Not that he was short. He was medium tall and had to look down into her eyes. But he did so without any superiority and without a trace of supplication. As though social distinctions—to which she and her erstwhile friends had always paid such jealous attention—were so much frippery. He saw through it all. He saw her.

Except he didn’t. He saw . . . Mrs. Pendrake? Who, pray tell, was Mrs. Pendrake?