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

Chapter 5

Blythe talked about assemblies for nine minutes.

Wren counted, because counting was what she did instead of sighing. The pump room, the circulating library, the master of ceremonies with his horrid little bow, the two viscounts who had danced with her twice and written nothing. Atticus asked two questions. Blythe answered each with six, and the fire snapped loudly into the pause that followed.

“And what do you enjoy, Your Grace?” Blythe asked at last, brightly, bravely.

Atticus glanced toward the windows. “Quiet.”

On the far side of the room, out of sight of her father, a spoon slipped in Wren’s fingers and clicked against the saucer.

The Duke’s eyes shifted toward the sound — not sharply. Lazily, even. But they found her in the half-second before she caught the spoon, and for one dangerous moment something moved across his face that was unmistakably, quietly, amusement.

She looked away first. Again.

“More tea,” Lord Ambrose said, and there was an edge under the words. “Wren. His Grace’s cup.”

There was no choice in it. She carried the cup across the carpet, and the long walk from the tea table to the mantel was the strangest journey of her life — twelve people watching her do a servant’s work in a daughter’s dress, Celeste’s smile hardening, her mother’s fan moving faster, her father’s face arranging itself into something pleasant for the Duke’s benefit.

She stopped at a proper distance and held out the saucer.

Atticus took the cup. But he did not turn away.

“That was a long walk,” he said. “You might have sent a footman.”

“It is my place, Your Grace.”

“Is it.”

He looked at her hands — one still cradling the saucer, the other hanging awkwardly at her side, ink-stained along the ridge of the thumb. Then he looked past her shoulder, to the wall by the door, where Nell stood rigid with her hands crossed and her eyes fixed on the middle distance like a soldier expecting sentence.

“You saved the sugar bowl,” he said.

Wren blinked. “Your Grace.”

“A moment ago. When it fell. You caught it before it landed.” He lifted the cup, unhurried. “It was closer to the floor than anyone wants to admit.”

“Apparently, Your Grace.”

“And you put the girl’s cap straight before your father could see that it was crooked.”

Wren said nothing. There was no answer that did not condemn either Nell or herself.

Lord Ambrose produced a brittle laugh from somewhere near the fireplace. “Wren has always concerned herself with household trifles. You must excuse her, Your Grace — she has no head for anything else.”

The Duke’s eyes returned to him, and they had cooled.

“Mais—”

Her father’s face changed, almost imperceptibly, in the way a pond changes when a stone goes in somewhere out of sight. He had almost said her name. He had caught it with his teeth, but the shape of it had been in the room, and Wren saw him realize that everyone had heard the shape.

So, clearly, did Atticus.

“Your Grace,” Celeste said quickly, “perhaps you would like to see the conservatory. The forcing house is really quite—”

“In a moment.”

He turned back to Wren, and this time he did not bother to keep his voice private at all, or perhaps he simply did not care that it carried.

“Do you always stand behind the furniture, Miss Ashby?”

The room stopped.

Wren’s cheeks warmed. Not with shame — with the peculiar heat of being seen doing something you had been told all your life was invisible. She looked up at him, and because she was tired, and because the day had been long, and because he had asked her the question in front of her father, she said the thing she had been thinking for six years.

“Only when the furniture has been assigned the more important position.”

Blythe made a strangled sound and turned it into a cough.

Her mother’s fan stopped dead. Her father’s face went the flat gray of old pewter. Celeste stared at her as if she had risen from the carpet.

And Atticus Vale — the Duke of Thornbury, who had dismissed his own cousin from his table in the middle of Christmas dinner, who was said to be as cold as the marble he was named for — looked at Wren Ashby for the length of a heartbeat.

Then the scar through his eyebrow shifted.

He smiled. It transformed him entirely. It made him look thirty years younger and about ten times more dangerous, because a man who smiles like that in a room full of people pretending has just told you he is not pretending.

“I see,” he said.

Lord Ambrose, clearly, did not.

“Wren,” he said. “I believe Cook requires assistance.”

Wren understood the dismissal perfectly. It was not a request about Cook. It was a hand closing around a wrist.

“Of course, Father.”

She curtsied, set the saucer down, and left the room with her eyes on the carpet — and she did not see, because she did not look back, that the Duke of Thornbury watched her go all the way to the door.