Phoebe pressed a soft, maternal kiss on Clio’s hair.
“Then your family will be there to help, my love,” Phoebe told her. “And I suspect that you might even learn that your new husband counts among that number.”
“I feel like an idiot,” Ramsay said, tugging on his cravat for the twentieth time. Jonathan, who had tasked himself with fixing that cravat every time Ramsay ruined it, made a sound of distress. “This clothing is unnatural.”
“You look like a gentleman,” Jonathan said, slapping Ramsay’s hands away as Ramsay tried to ‘help’ repair the necktie.
“Aye,” Ramsay agreed, resigned. “Unnatural.”
“Will the two of ye close your gobs,” Hector snapped. He was trying to remain calm. He was trying to be resolute.
He would see Clio here today. He would marry her.
And he would try like hell to avoid doing anything else to hurt her.
“He’s in a right snit,” Ramsay commented to Jonathan, not even bothering to lower his voice. “Which is understandable, given that he is marrying a beautiful woman to whom he is so drawn that he can’t keep his hands off her long enough to say the vows. What man wouldn’t be miserable in his place?”
Hector made a rude gesture. Jonathan made another distressed sound, but this one was just for show.
“You have to admit, Your Grace,” he said, shooting Ramsay a superior look at this excellent show of manners, “that you have done rather well for yourself. I’ll allow that therewasa bit of a scandal—” Even Hector, who was clinging to self-control with both fists, had to let out a snort at this understatement. “—but you’ve only been back in London for two weeks, and you already have a lovely bride from a good family. And you didn’t even have to take an old one.”
“I’m assuming you aren’t married, Jonathan,” Ramsay said casually. “Given your sweet nothings when it comes to describing ladies.”
“I am married to my work, sirrah,” Jonathan retorted.
Hector ignored them. It was astonishing to think that it had been only two weeks since he had met Clio. How was such a thing even possible? He’d once spent four straight weeks on a specialized joinery project, and the whole thing had gone by in a flash.
But these weeks … they’d changed his life. And today, he’d swear to that, in front of God and man.
Though not many men, really. Even though Hector was a duke and Clio a duke’s daughter, they weren’t going to be married in one of the city’s great churches. Instead, they had found a small chapel and issued invitations to family only.
For Hector, this had meant inviting nobody except Ramsay, since Hector and his brother despised one another, and Matthew’s wife sniffed in disgust every time they happened to cross paths in the house.
For Clio, that apparently meant inviting half the bloodyton.
“Who are all these people?” he grumbled when his patience ran out.
Bless sweet Jonathan, who grinned like he’d been waiting his entire life to answer this exact question.
“These,” he said grandly, “are the Lightholders.”
There was a pause and then.
“I am wasted on the two of you,” the butler muttered. “Right. So that one there—” He gestured subtly at the central man, who held himself with all the regal confidence of a king, even though there was a young girl on his knee who was busily using his forearm as a stage for her rag doll to do a dance. “—is the Duke of Godwin, Xander Lightholder, the head of the family. Next to him is his wife, Helen. Then there’s David Nightingale—if you thinkyouhave started a scandal, you should hear some of his exploits—and his wife, Ariadne. She’s a Lightholder by birth?—”
“I regret asking,” Hector interrupted. Even the noise inside his own head was better than the walking and talking Debrett’s show that Jonathan was putting on.
By the time the crowd of well-to-do Londoners, all apparently members of the family that Hector would join in a moment, settled into their seats, Hector had been clenching his fists for so long and with such force that his knuckles ached.
And then, finally—or perhaps too soon, Clio entered.
She looked perfect, and she looked all wrong. Hector’s chest twisted with the contradiction.
She was always beautiful, of course, but there was a redness to her eyes that suggested that she’d been crying. Hector had never been bothered by women’s tears overmuch before he had met Clio, and yet now he found that the veryideaof her weeping unsettled him.
Once more, he was seized with the unstoppable urge to comfort her. He took half a step forward before he caught himself.
Even waiting one more minute to have her at his side was agony.
