Isla beamed and held onto Edward’s arm. He patted her hand and smiled down at her. The doting husband and the adoring wife. To Sir Thomas Kingsbury, who owned a newspaper and Lady Margaret Shaftesbury. The perfect couple. Smiles. Touches. Eyes lit.
Edward felt the glow from her. Felt it through his gloves when he rested his hand upon hers. Felt it when their eyes met. It melted him when he had considered himself impenetrable.Granite should not melt without intense heat. A pair of pretty eyes should not provide that heat.
He steered her gently when needed, released her when a circle of ladies wanted the bride to themselves, retrieved her again.
“We tell the tale well, don’t we?” Isla said after one of those excursions.
She held a glass of ruby red wine. Edward ran a hand through his hair, gloves discarded and a glass of wine of his own, half consumed.
“We do. I have overheard the whispers.”
“About what a fine match we make?”
“The very same,” Edward found himself smiling. “I did not think it would be this easy.”
“To fool everybody?” Isla asked, sweetly.
It was a cold bucket of water. Edward frowned.
“I did not need to be reminded of our arrangement,” he said.
Why would she remind me if her objective is to trap me?
She behaved as if she had read the manual and chosen not to fight it. She smiled when addressed, answering what was asked with a poise she did not over-do. More than once, as he guided her hand to a guest, he saw the faint white line on her third finger. Broken glass. The whisky they had shared.
God, the idiocy of that night!
She had bled and none of it made sense outside his skull but the guilty heat of it still flickered.
“Your Grace?” a footman murmured at his elbow, proffering an embossed card on a tray. Edward read the names and felt his mouth go hard.
The Duke of Glenmore and his son the Marquis of Morlich.
He lifted his eyes to the doorway and there they were, exactly on time. Father and son. The elder was handsome in the severe way of men who have spent a lifetime arranging their faces to forbid laughter. Morlich, with the glossy arrogance of a horse that has never been asked to work. They wore civility like armor.
I would not have invited such men had the choice been purely mine. They are not the kind of company I enjoy.
His mother had sent the invitation without asking him. Of course she had. If she could not unmake the marriage, she would chisel the guest list to carve her own story into the day. Edward made a point of turning away, feigning absorption in a duchess’s anecdote. He felt Morlich’s glance search the room and slide off him. A moment later the young man’s laugh, too bright by half, cut across the conversation.
Hyde Park came back, sharp as a thrown stone. The buck who had baited Isla. The way she had taken the line and beaten him at his own joke. Edward shifted his position so that the nearest pillar put Morlich inadequately but symbolically out of sight.
“Your Grace.” The Dowager Duchess had materialized at his shoulder, taking advantage of Isla being diverted into conversation with her friend, Lady Victoria. “Do greet the Duke of Glenmore.”
“The room is large,” he said without looking at her, “he will find a corner he likes.”
“You are not a sulky boy,” she said, “do not play at it.”
“And you are not the master of this hall.” He kept his tone mild for the sake of his mother. “Do not pretend you are.”
She left him with a glance that promised a later engagement. He exhaled and returned to the only useful task at hand, being the man whose name his wife now carried.
They moved on. Alistair Drummond had cached himself at the far buffet with two peers and a decanter; he was in easy spirits and climbing. Color rode his cheekbones; his laugh arrived before he did. He caught Isla’s gaze across the room and lifted his glass in a toast that wobbled just enough to be seen.
She gave him a look that might once have hauled him out of a river by the ear. He winked, happy. Edward had the sudden foreknowledge of later trouble and the old tiredness that came of anticipating another man’s hangover.
“Wexford,” a voice said behind him, warm as a remembered hearth, “You’ve managed it, then.”
He turned with his first genuine smile of the day. “Henry!”
