Towards the middle of the evening, after the duchess excused herself to pay a call to the nursery, Leith stood and walked across the drawing room, settling himself on the sofa next to her.Beatrice observed Lord Tremberley and Lord Edington exchange a glance.
Then, when Leith took her hand, Henrietta actually choked on her wine.
For a moment, everyone else in the room appeared to struggle with their countenance.
Until Lord Tremberley launched into an anecdote clearly just to cover the silence.
Beatrice did not know what to think.
Such doings supported what the duchess had said.
She studied the marquess who, for the moment, had her as his exclusive property.
It did not, she was aware, strictly make sense.
Here was a handsome, wealthy, powerful man, a near god to most, who had enjoyed every advantage of existence since his birth and who had bedded many of the most beautiful women of the age.
And she was just a plain woman from the minor gentry, selling herself in the hopes of hanging on to her hopelessly encumbered family estate.
Of course, she had made men fall in love before.
Men of modest means.
One unscrupulous single vicar.
The linen draper.
But she was not delusional about her charms.
No, she thought.
The duchess must be mistaken.
It was impossible that the Marquess of Leith had fallen in love with her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
With sinking dread,the Marquess of Leith realized that he had fallen in love with Beatrice Salisbury.
On his own, outside of the influence of his friends, Leith was sure that the thought would not have occurred to him, even given the obvious intensity of his feelings for her.
But when he saw Beatrice in the context of two of his best friends and their wives, the parallels were unmistakable.
He had never before understood the impulses that led his friends to want to be so near their wives at all times.How they seemed to derive life itself from these women.
But when he had been sitting in John’s drawing room, a place that he had sat countless times, and had looked at Beatrice from across the room, a deep, primal urge had compelled him to cross the room and sit next to her.
To take her hand.
He saw the glance exchanged between Trem and John when he did so.
And, then, with a jagged, terrified feeling, he knew.
The problem with this reality was manifold, he reflected, as he and Beatrice drove back to his town house that evening.
First, their liaison was only to be two weeks long.He had no notion of whether she would be open to a more lasting arrangement.
Second, his best friend thought that he hadn’t touched the woman.
