Page 90 of Duke of Rath

All color drained from the woman’s face. She stood in complete silence, looking like a statue made of human flesh.

“Mr. John Rose?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Patience took a step forward, afraid Christine might fall. “The very same. Did you know him?”

The woman’s hand still clutched her wet linen, which moved weakly in the slight breeze blowing through the street. “Oh, I knew him. And you’re…the Duchess of Rath? Why does that sound so familiar?”

Patience’s senses tightened and sharpened at the same time. As though a crack ran through her very existence. There had been the part of her life before the crack. And there would be the part after. Would Christine’s next words split apart her life completely?

Patience swallowed hard. “Did you know my husband, too?” she asked, her voice croaking through the tension in her throat.

Christine took a few steps towards her and clutched the wet cloth to her chest, her eyes wide and strangely unseeing. “I did,” said Christine, her blue eyes framed by reddish eyelashes glancing over Patience. “John looked like you…back then. Pretty. Golden curls. Blue eyes. The face of an angel.”

Patience licked her lips nervously. She may have come closer to the truth than ever before. She chuckled softly. “Yes, all Roses look alike.”

Christine’s gaze shifted, distant and unfocused, as if peering through Patience to something unsettling just beyond. A tremor passed through her. “John attacked me,” she said. “I know I should not speak ill of the dead. But…”

Attacked her?

John?

Patience shook her head in disbelief.

On that quiet Oxford street with daffodils in bloom and geraniums on the windowsills, under a blue sky, her world was shattering.

No. It was as though Patience was hearing about a completely different person. The John she knew had taught her how to do country dances, had helped her climb a tree to rescue a kitten, had brought her a bouquet of wildflowers every time he went out for a walk.

“He forced himself on me,” said the woman shakily. “And Lord Perrin, he found us. He protected me against John. He threw him off me, and he saved me from utter disgrace…”

Lord Perrin… Dorian! Dorian had been Lord Perrin while his papa was alive.

He had protected this maid…from John?

John had forced himself on Christine? No, surely not John… Could she believe this woman she’d only just met? A stranger? Yet, somehow, she did. Christine’s gaze, so full of fear and desperation and helplessness, could not lie.

But what did that mean? Was this the Oxford incident Dorian had been hiding from her? Could she be wrong about John? Was it possible that John was a terrible man and Dorian simply didn’t want to destroy her opinion of her brother…? Despite her confusion and sadness over John’s actions, her chest filled with warmth. Dorian had been broken by his father, but he was honorable and kind. He rescued women in peril—and rescued her family from financial ruin. That was the man she knew and loved.

Christine’s gaze fell on something behind Patience’s shoulder and her eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she whispered, dropping the cloth from splayed fingers. For a moment she contemplated picking it up, then turned and rushed back through the dark door of The Bear.

“Christine!” cried Patience as she picked up the damp cloth.

She was set to run after her despite the social rules forbidding an unchaperoned woman of good standing from entering such an establishment.

“Patience.”

She’d know that voice among hundreds, thousands, a million others.

The only voice that made her entire being reverberate like a tuning fork and stand at attention with the joy of being alive.

Her husband.

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Patience turned slowly to look at him.

Dorian had just witnessed her talking to the maid he’d saved from John Rose all those years ago, and he couldn’t move. For the first time, even his beast felt helpless.

It raged and spat and threw things like the horrible demon it was.