“What would you expect?”
“I daresay it isn’t the worst of the rumors.”
Marchmont’s gaze swung toward the Four Harridans of the Apocalypse.
“You ought to see the satirical prints,” he said. “Most…inventive.”
“You needn’t rub it in.”
“You find it all hilarious, I don’t doubt.”
“If you’d been harried from pillar to post, as we have been—”
“Don’t waste your breath. He—”
“You are a duke,” came a feminine voice that didn’t belong to any of them. It was like theirs but different.
Marchmont turned away from the Matrons of Doom and toward the girl at the window: the girl who was and wasn’t the Zoe he’d known so long ago.
She had risen from the chair. Her deep red cashmere shawl set off handsomely the pale green frock and was draped in a way that perfectly framed her figure. The high-necked frock’s narrow bodice outlined an agreeably rounded bosom. The fall of the skirt told him her waist was smallish and her hips full. She seemed taller than her sisters, though it was hard to be sure, given that two of them had expanded so much horizontally, and all four of them were seated.
In any event, she was not a pocket Venus by any means but a full-sized model.
Her potently blue eyes held a speculative glint. Or was he imagining that? His vision was in good order. He had no trouble focusing. His brain, on the other hand, was unusually sluggish.
“You speak English,” he said. “More or less.”
“It was much less at first,” she said. “Lord Winterton hired a companion and a maid for me. They couldn’t speak Arabic. No one else but he could, and he would not. For all the journey home, I had to speak English. And it came back.” She tipped her head to one side, studying his face as though it, too, were a forgotten language. “I remember you.”
In the voice that was like and unlike her sisters’ he detected no trace of anything one might call a foreign accent. Yet she spoke with a lilt that made the sound exotic. It was a voice with shadows and soft edges.
“I should hope so,” he said. “You tried to kill me with a cricket bat once.”
She nodded. “I went round and round, then I fell on my bottom. You laughed so hard you fell down.”
“Did I?” He remembered all too clearly. The mental cupboard would not stay closed.
“I remembered that while I was away,” she continued. “I often pictured you falling down laughing, and the recollection cheered me.” She paused. “But you are…different.”
“So are you.”
“And you are a duke.”
“Have been for some time,” he said. “Since before you went away.” Forever. She’d gone away forever. But she was back. He knew her, yet she was a stranger. The world was not altogether in balance.
She nodded, her smile fading. “I recall. Your brother. It was very sad.”
Sad. Was that the word?
It was in the way she said it. He heard a world of sorrow in that word. He remembered how she’d wept and how shocked he’d been, because Zoe Octavia never wept. And that had somehow made his own grief all the more unbearable.
“It was a long time ago,” he said.
“Not to me,” she said. “I crossed seas, and it was like crossing years. To everyone it must seem as though I have come back from the dead. If only I had done so in truth, I might have brought your brother with me.”
One devastating moment of shock, a sting within as of a wound opening—but then:
“Good heavens, Zoe!” a sister cried.
