Shoulders slumping, I tracked back to the pianoforte. “I don’t want to disappoint her.”
“So, you’re willing to risk losing her to someone else? All because you think you’ll be a different man if you win a prize.”
“It’s an award my mother and Prahmn will recognize. You know the challenges Miss Wilcox and I will face. I’ll need my parents’ blessing. I have to make sure that any bride is protected—a Blackamoor wife, even more so. And children. How will they be received if my parents refuse to accept my wife, my children, and my profession?”
“Their opinions won’t matter to a house built on love.”
“It always matters. It matters if I can’t afford a home. Being poor doesn’t make the best plan.”
I began to play.
Torrance hummed. “This is lovely, but it’s taken. Haydn’sThe Seasonsis popular. So do not enter it in the Harlbert’s Prize. Perhaps you should share your composition with Miss Wilcox, let her be more than a muse. Let her be your partner. She’s three-dimensional with life and vigor. She can help.”
“No, Torrance. This is my work. It has to be mine, done on my own.”
The duke clapped. “Hear, hear! Dido has heard you. But she’s not offering applause. Fickle, I say.” Torrance chuckled and fingered one of the brass buttons along his waistcoat. “Painted flesh is limited but, like a true woman, she will not be moved by promises.”
“You know that’s not what I mean or what I’m doing.”
“I find making those separations problematic. And the future should be planned by two.”
Humming, the duke turned and headed toward the entrance. “To be young and so impassioned about the future, thinking there will always be another chance for magic—that’s folly.”
His tone was cryptic. The duke wasn’t a subtle fellow.
When he greeted Georgina in the hall with the physician, Mr. Carew, a man with a thriving practice and a similar background to hers, and who’d known the Wilcox family a long time, I think I understood.
My stomach knotted.
My keystrokes became harder, firing with passion and jealousy. I looked at Dido, joyful Dido who’d been painted the moment before she ran. With the options Georgina Wilcox had before her, I was the most unlikely direction for her to turn.
Chapter 25
MARK—KITCHENCONVERSATIONS
For twenty minutes or more, I played the pianoforte for my audience of Dido and Elizabeth, pounding the keys until my fingers throbbed. I added not one note to my composition.
Torrance’s speech had done what I supposed he’d set out to do: made me a jealous fool. Stepping away from my lifeless audience, I walked out of the music room and headed to the kitchen.
Hearing Georgie’s laughter come from the back of the house, I prepared to see a cozy sight.
But I wasn’t ready.
Two people—she in his arms—chuckling, with flour scattered on them like snow and along the wide cedar planks of the floor. Holding to an upper shelf, Georgina hung there as Mr. Carew supported her.
“My lord,” she said in a voice that sounded surprised and winded, “Mr. Carew and I have had a bit of a disaster.”
Like orange flames in the hearth, I burned. I was in a fake relationship, but I no longer felt as if we had a faux commitment, but something true. Shouldn’t my pretend lover be faithful to me, not enjoying a moment with Carew?
Getting my mind to clear of wishing to haul Carew away from my fake fiancée, I cleared my throat. “Can I assist?”
His ashy-brown hands, or powder-doused ones, were about her waist. He lowered my goddess to the floor.
“Lord Mark,” she said, giggling as the fellow picked up her fallen ladder. “Mr. Carew, you have been too helpful.”
The two laughed again.
“Quite a disaster,” I said. “Let me help you clean up.”
