Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 23

Six months later, Thornbury House filled with candlelight for the Duke and Duchess’s first autumn reception.

Wren stood at the top of the staircase in deep blue silk with one hand resting lightly on her husband’s arm, and looked down at a hall of people who had once walked past her to get to a prettier sister.

Celeste was there, with the barrister, and Verity, up from Bristol for three days, and Blythe, and Aunt Constance, who had brought candlesticks that Wren did not need and would keep forever. Mr. Quill was there. So was Mr. Beckett, in a coat that Wren had paid for without telling him, standing near the window with a glass of claret and the look of a man who was not entirely sure he was allowed to be in this room.

The steward raised his voice.

“His Grace Atticus Vale, Duke of Thornbury, and Her Grace Wren Vale, Duchess of Thornbury.”

Wren’s step faltered for half a beat on the second name.

Atticus leaned down as they descended.

“I prefer the second one.”

“How fortunate you married it.”

Later — much later, when the candles had burned to half and the great doors had been propped open for air — an elderly gentleman approached Atticus near the fire and nodded across the room, where Wren stood laughing at something Celeste had said, which was a thing Wren had not done in the presence of her sister in twenty-two years.

“Your wife is remarkable, Thornbury.”

Atticus’s gaze softened.

“Yes.”

“How did you meet her?”

A familiar amusement touched his face.

“Her family introduced everyone else.”

The gentleman waited, politely, for the rest of the answer.

Across the room, Wren caught her husband’s eye and knew instantly — the way you know, after six months of a marriage, exactly what a person is saying on the far side of a crowded hall — that he was about to tell the truth.

“Then,” said Atticus Vale, “I asked her name.”

And the gentleman, who had heard that the Duke of Thornbury was a cold man and was beginning to have doubts about it, said, “And?”

And the Duke of Thornbury smiled, which was a thing that still startled people.

“And she told me,” he said. “And every person in the room looked as though I had just asked a servant for the contents of the safe.”

Wren raised an eyebrow at him across forty feet of waxed floor, and he raised one back — the scarred one — and neither of them explained a word of it to anyone for the rest of the evening.