“Here?” Lady Wethersby said, her expression stricken. She did not relish, Catherine knew, being discovered so fallen from her former station. Furthermore, Catherine could not think of who from their old life would venture so far from Mayfair. They hadn’t had visitors of the noble or even moneyed type since they took up these lodgings three years ago.
“I’ll answer,” Catherine whispered, wanting to spare Lady Wethersby. Recently, they had had to dismiss all of their servants but their maid-of-all work, Melinda. It was a searing fall for the widow of a baronet. Catherine wasn’t the appropriate footman but she could at least pass for a lady’s companion.
“Ariel, go upstairs. We don’t think it’s a dun.”
“But I want to see the visitor.”
“It’s quite all right, Catherine,” Lady Wethersby said, straightening her back. “If they have come, they must see me as I am. It is worse to pretend. We must meet them as we are.”
And then with all the elegance of her old manner, Lady Wethersby walked into the antechamber to receive their unexpected guest.
Catherine looked at Ariel, who cocked an eyebrow at Catherine and said, with a smirk, “Mother has grown up.”
Catherine laughed.
That laugh died, however, when she looked up from Ariel and saw—him.
John Breminster.
The Marquess of Forster.
It was as if her thoughts a few minutes ago about that night in the Tremberley gardens had summoned him in the flesh.
They stared at one another. He was somehow more handsome than she remembered, which she would have sworn couldn’t have been possible, that she must have exaggerated in the other direction—and, yet, here he was, proving that supposition wrong. He was older, too, but in a good way. If he had been a little boyish before, he had now weathered into a full-fledged man.
A strikingly handsome man.
She swallowed hard.
A strikingly handsome man whom she hated on principle.
She could not help but admire his eyes, green as the Dorset hills, and his fine, curling dark hair, which she knew from experience felt silken to the touch. She remembered his mouth from that night in the gardens, too, how it wasn’t lush, but firm and expressive, an inadvertent barometer of his desires. And he had desiredher—before he knew who she really was. She hated that she knew how good his chest, broad and strong, felt against her body. And that she remembered with painful accuracy the wonderful sensation of his mouth at her throat.
Catherine would have been sure she was hallucinating if it weren’t for Lady Wethersby. She looked as if she had momentarily died and then been hastily resuscitated.
When Elena spoke, she didn’t even attempt to hide the shaking in her voice.
“Your Grace. Miss Catherine Forster and my son, Sir Ariel Wethersby.”
Ariel looked back and forth between the three of them, his eyes wide. Even Ariel, who knew nothing about the scandal in her family’s past, was stunned. The appearance of a high-ranking aristocrat in dingy Halston Place was shocking enough on its own.
And then it hit her. What Lady Wethersby had called him.
“YourGrace?”
“My father has died,” John Breminster said, bluntly, with no expression. She noted his black waistcoat, cravat and jacket. He was in mourning.
He was the Duke of Edington.
Her palms had begun to sweat and she wiped them on her dress. She felt faint but forced herself to keep standing. She didn’t want him to think that his presence affected her in any way.It didn’t, she told herself, biting the inside of her cheek and stealing a glance up at him again. She lowered her gaze once more. Looking at him proved dangerous.
Meanwhile, she stood there before him in a day dress faded to the color of pigeon, with a scorch mark on the sleeve, and her hair turned up hastily. To him, used to the bright gowns and perfect toilettes of Mayfair ladies, she must appear particularly wretched.
She said nothing in response to his revelation. She could not express the conventional sympathy. She did not relish the idea of anyone dying, but her disdain for the late duke kept her from uttering the typical regrets. She wasn’t sure she could speak anyway and she wasn’t willing to risk trying.
Fortunately, Lady Wethersby did the honors, murmuring sympathy in her best society matron tones.
And then the marquess—the duke—interrupted her.
