The Duke was not coming.
“The Duke,” her mother murmured at last, clasping her hands with false serenity, “must be terribly busy. Perhaps tomorrow.”
“I think,” her father added, clearing his throat with all the dignity of a man avoiding utter humiliation, “that it would be prudent to send you to your Aunt Ellie for a while. Just until this all…dies down.”
“Father!” the twins protested in unison.
Prim bit the side of her lower lip with her teeth, an old, familiar habit she fell back on when cornered. Actually, Auntie Ellie lived in a lovely countryside villa and allowed Prim everything as long as they shared romance novels after dinner. Prim wouldn’t mind the vacation.
But leaving now meant leaving her sisters alone with their image-perfectionist mother and their reputation-obsessed father. And Prim wasn’t cruel enough to abandon them to that.
“We will discuss it tomorrow,” her father declared, already marching toward the door, her mother sweeping after him like a ship caught in his wake.
The instant the adults vanished, Camilla and Myrtle rushed to her. They sank onto the carpet at her feet, clutching her hands tightly, their faces full of worry.
“Oh, Prim,” they whispered, full of sisterly heartbreak. “They can’t send you away. Not in the middle of the Season.”
Prim inhaled slowly, letting the fear settle into something sharper, steadier. Her jaw tightened. Her chin lifted.
“Don’t worry, girls,” Prim said, her voice low with newly forged steel. “I have a plan.”
CHAPTER 2
Nightly Visit
Truth be told, the wordplanwas vastly exaggerated when Prim uttered it. In reality, it was mostly a risky endeavor with minimal chances of success, stitched together by despair and sheer stubbornness. The situation called for measures that polite society would faint dramatically over, but Prim was not ready to cower.
She refused to sit idly in her drawing room, leaving the initiative to a man who chased scandals the way Camilla chased lemon cakes, praying that the heavens graced him with a rare moment of decency.
If the Duke refused to call upon her during modest hours, she had no qualms to call upon him during decidedly unholy ones.
Granted, Prim had never tried to sneak out of her house in the middle of the night, but she was adept enough to form a secureprotocol of action that would not land her name in the gossip sheets for two consecutive days.
Sneaking out of the house was one thing. Securing a hack was also arranged for. So, this is how Prim found herself leaving London behind for the outskirts. On the way there, Prim almost tore her handkerchief from how she was wrangling it. But not once did she think of ordering the man to take her back.
“We are here, miss,” the voice of the driver made her jump up.
Prim looked at the Mildenhall estate. One look at the building, and Prim reevaluated her intentions and even slipped for a moment, weighing if loving her sisters meant so much as to venture forth.
The building rose out of the night like some golden colossus, its façade stretched endlessly, adorned with more windows than were strictly necessary for a single man. The towers, because of course there were towers, stood like giant sentinels upon the land. Even the shrubs were manicured to perfection, so much so that Prim felt judged.
This was the house of a man who had never once in his life needed to explain himself to anyone. And she was about to do exactly that.
“Wait for me,” she told the driver. “This won’t take long.”
Prim got out and finally let the poor handkerchief rest in her reticule and made her way to the imposing entrance. She was ready to knock when the door flew open. Prim took one step back to avoid being barreled down by a woman fleeing the building as if it were on fire.
Prim took one look at the woman, her face half-hidden by her hood. Even so, her trembling lips and rolling tears could not be hidden. The woman didn’t even look at Prim as she stormed away in a carriage that awaited her.
Prim stood there, stunned, looking at the carriage as it left the estate in the middle of the night like some medieval ghost story. She didn’t need any explanation to know that this was one of the Duke’s many admirers who faced with the brutal consequences of dealing with a man like the Duke of Mildenhall.
But who was she to judge? She was here, in the same place, knowing pretty well what she was getting herself into. Minus the emotional entanglement.
“Miss?”
Prim jumped up. She turned and saw a butler with quite a nonchalant expression on his face. As if it were perfectly ordinary to usher out one crying woman, only to find a fresh one queued up on the steps.
“This way, Miss,” he said politely and guided her through the entrance.
