Madeline felt the pull too, almost aching. The sight of Wilhelm moving through the dance with controlled elegance did something to her body, even as she told herself to look away. His hand rested upon another woman’s waist. His posture was impeccable. The Duke’s expression was composed, and yet Madeline could not stop imagining what that hand would feel like if it were hers beneath it, the heat of his palm, the strength in his fingers. The thought made her skin burn beneath the confines of her sleeves, and she shifted slightly, grateful for the shadows at the room’s edge.
She forced her attention back to Tessa, just in time to see one of the ladies leaning down toward the child as she passed, her smile sweet and brittle all at once.
“My, you dance so bravely,” the woman said, her tone pitched high with encouragement.
Tessa smiled back, flushed and pleased.
But the moment the woman straightened, when she believed herself unobserved, her expression soured. Her gaze slid, involuntarily or not, to the faint pale lines at Tessa’s cheeks, to the scars that could not be hidden by silk or candlelight, and something like discomfort flickered across her features before she looked away again.
Madeline felt the slight on Tessa’s behalf.
She watched, her fingers curling briefly into her palm before she forced them to relax. She had learned, too, how careless it could be to call out cruelty dressed in politeness, especially since the child looked happy despite it all.
Another pair of ladies followed suit as the dance continued. They showered Tessa with their attention when Wilhelm’s gaze brushed their way, their voices lilting with praise and admiration. But when the music turned and the room’s focus shifted elsewhere, Madeline saw it again and again: the faint recoil, the glance held a second too long, the subtle stepping back, as though the scars on Tessa’s face might be contagious.
Protectiveness rose in Madeline’s chest like a tide, fierce and unyielding. She wanted, irrationally, to place herself bodily between Tessa and the world, to shield her from every careless look, every unthinking judgment. She understood now, with theclarity that made her ache, why Wilhelm’s restraint was what it was, why his anger came quiet and lethal rather than loud. It was control born of love.
Her gaze lifted, unbidden, to him again.
He was watching too. She saw it in the way his eyes followed his daughter’s movements even as he danced, the way his jaw set when he noticed the same things she did. For a fleeting moment, their eyes met across the room, and something passed between them, wordless and electric, a shared fury held in check for the sake of a child who deserved joy.
Madeline’s pulse skidded. She looked away first, because the heat of that shared look was too much, because it stirred things she could not afford to acknowledge. She shifted her weight; the silk of her gown whispered softly as she did, and she became acutely aware of herself again, of the way the dress hugged her more closely than she was used to, of the way her body felt exposed and alive beneath it.
She told herself it was foolish. She was standing alone at the edge of a ballroom, watching other people dance. That was all.
And then she sawher mother.
She caught no more than a flash at first, a familiar line of the jaw, a particular tilt of the head that struck her with such force it stole the air from her lungs. Madeline’s breath hitched, her vision narrowing abruptly as though the room had dimmed around that single point.
Her heart slammed against her ribs, loud enough she was certain it must be audible. She scanned the crowd again, more carefully this time. Her gaze darted from face to face, from hairstyle to posture, from profile to profile. There were dozens of women here, all dressed in variations of the same finery, all laughing and conversing and moving in practiced patterns.
It was nothing,she told herself.A trick of memory, of fear.
Madeline pressed her hand briefly to her sternum, her fingers trembling despite her effort to still them, and forced herself to breathe slowly. She looked back toward Tessa, grounding herself in the sight of the child’s bright face, the sound of her laughter as Henry spun her gently, the way Wilhelm’s shoulders eased just a fraction at the sight.
She waited until the music swelled and attention shifted once more, then took a careful step back, and another, easing herself along the wall with practiced subtlety.
At the far edge of the room, she paused. Her gaze flicked once more to Tessa and Henry before finally resting on Wilhelm. The child was laughing, her movements confident now, her fear held at bay. Wilhelm’s attention was divided. His duty to his guests called him back toward the center of the room, toward the women who awaited him with hopeful smiles.
Madeline swallowed.
“I will only be gone for a moment,” she whispered to herself, the words a quiet promise rather than an announcement. “Just enough to breathe.”
She slipped through a side door and into a quieter corridor, the sounds of the ballroom dulling at once, the music fading to a distant thrum. The change was immediate and profound. Her shoulders sagged as though she had been holding them rigid for hours. Her breath came easier now that the air was cooler, less laden with scent.
She walked slowly at first, then a little faster, her steps echoing softly against the polished floor as she followed the corridor toward the gardens, toward darkness and space and the blessed anonymity of night. Her thoughts raced despite the quiet, looping back again and again to the image she could not quite banish, to the familiar shape she had seen in the crowd and the fear it had ignited.
You imagined it, she told herself firmly.You must have.
And yet even as she pushed open the door and stepped out into the cool air, the unease remained, a small, insistent knot beneath her ribs. She drew a deep breath, letting the night fill her lungs, and closed her eyes for a moment, gathering herself.
Madeline only knew that she needed a moment alone before the world demanded her composure again.
CHAPTER 21
“Get hold of yourself,” she murmured under her breath, the words barely more than a thread of sound. “You are not a frightened girl anymore.”
The garden lay hushed beneath the night. Here, the noise of the ballroom was reduced to a distant, muffled pulse behind her, as though the house itself was breathing somewhere far away. Gravel shifted softly beneath Madeline’s slippers as she followed the path beyond the terrace, the hedges dark and orderly on either side, their shapes softened by shadow, and beyond them the lawn stretched out in quiet, silvered by moonlight.
