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"You say you are not well acquainted with the ton. Then perhaps I might mend that, a little. I should be glad to make one or two introductions." His head tipped a fraction to the side, his eyes searching hers. "That is, if it is something you should like."

Harriet let her gaze go round the bright, crowded room, and came back to him. "I should be glad to walk with you, Your Grace," she said, a little astonished at her own eagerness, "though there is no need of any particular introductions, only if you think it worth the trouble."

"Then a turn about the room it shall be." He offered his arm a second time, and she took it without hesitation, and thought — silently, wonderingly — that there was a comfortable warmth between them now that had not been there this afternoon, a thing that had sprung up and taken root with unseemly speed. Rather than let the talk drift back to her own troubles, she asked him of his family, and found the subject one he warmed to at once.

He spoke of his brother in France, of cousins scattered the length of England and one or two gone to Scotland, of the great Blackwood estate and all its weight, and of the tenants he had come, plainly, to care for. She listened with real interest, finding his manner easy and his company far pleasanter than she had any business finding it, as they made their slow circuit of the floor.

"You must find such responsibilities exhausting," she said, when he paused for breath. "My own father was a diligent man, but a dukedom is a heavier charge than his ever was."

"So I am often told," he said, a little wryly, and she smiled. "My father prepared me well for it."

She held his gaze a moment. "Might I be so bold as to ask — do you miss him?"

His smile slipped away. "I do. Yes. As you must miss your husband, and your father both."

"We were dear friends, as I have said." The confession came from her more easily than she expected, as though she had known him far longer than a day. "It is the companionship I miss. The having of someone to turn to."

The Duke nodded slowly. "A lady such as yourself will not want for companionship all her life, I think, should she wish for it again."

Warmth climbed her cheeks, and she turned her face from him. Was he suggesting she might marry again? That she might one day find such a friendship as she had known with Edward?

"Friendship comes in many shapes," he went on, as though he had read the very thought from her face, "even for one who chooses never to wed. Through distant family, sometimes. Through old acquaintance. Through new connections, made unexpectedly."

Her heart lifted, gently, at the kindness of it. "And sometimes, mayhap, through strangers who appear from nowhere to untangle troublesome endowments?"

The Duke laughed, and his eyes found hers and held, and the vividness in them sent a small thrill straight through her. "On the rare occasion, perhaps." And there was, beneath the composed surface of him, a look steady and warm that sent a fresh, alarming warmth all through her, and made her heart shift and settle in a new place.

The feeling frightened her, and she turned her head away, her pulse knocking hard at the base of her throat.

"I — I should return to my friend," she said, more abruptly than she meant to. "You have been very kind, Your Grace."

"I have not yet made a single introduction," he protested, as she lifted her hand from his arm.

"Another occasion, perhaps." She stumbled a little over the words and took a step back from him, frightened by this sudden, swelling thing in her that had risen too fast to be governed. "I thank you, Your Grace."

She turned on her heel and moved away before he could say anything further. Her heart still beat furiously, her breath came quick as though she had only just stepped from a dance, and her hands, inside her gloves, were damp. Her eyes went from one side of the room to the other, half afraid someone would read her disordered face and begin to wonder what — or who — had put such a look on it. Her dance with the Duke would surely have been marked. It might already be moving from mouth to mouth.

He is to help me in the matter of my endowment, she reminded herself, and felt the relief of the shadowed edge of the room fold round her. That, and nothing more. I cannot let myself feel anything beyond it. Her heart went on clamoring against the instruction. Her conscience pricked at her, and she dropped her gaze to the floor.

She was but newly out of mourning. She had never given a serious thought to marrying again. She could not — would not — do such a thing, with her husband so short a time in the ground. It would feel like a betrayal. A forgetting of all they had shared, even if what they had shared had been only the deep, quiet friendship of two people fond of one another, and never a grand passion.

And yet, for all that — Harriet became far too aware of these new and unsettling feelings that had driven themselves down into her heart and would not be dislodged. Small, they were, barely there at all. But real. Real enough that she could not pretend she had not felt them. She had never known such a thing before, and that, more than any watcher on any corner, was what frightened her most of all.

Chapter Six

To sit across from a beautiful lady and be granted a few quiet minutes in which simply to admire her was, Benedict thought, a pleasure he did not often allow himself. It surprised him, the eagerness that had risen in him at the mere prospect of her company again. But that, he supposed, was the natural yield of the previous evening's conversation and the small, careful understanding it had built between them.

Lady Colbourne's carriage carried them toward the office of Mr. Wells, and though they sat in silence, there was no awkwardness in it, no tension. Something had shifted in the way they regarded one another, a measure of trust that had not been there before, and Benedict was more grateful for it than he cared to examine.

"It is a very pleasant afternoon," she murmured, her gaze on the window. "I feel I ought to be as still as the leaves on the trees above us. Instead my anxiety is like a stirring wind within my heart."

When she glanced at him, Benedict spread his hands, in a way he hoped conveyed sympathy. "It is only to be expected, Lady Colbourne," he said, as she caught the edge of her lip between her teeth. "This is a confusing matter, and though Mr. Braithwaite does right to go through the will with such care, that care brings you no comfort while you wait upon it. Perhaps it may help, a little, to remember that all we do today carries us nearer to a conclusion — and that the conclusion is what we are working toward."

Her eyes held his, and she nodded slowly before letting her gaze return to the world beyond the glass. Benedict kept his own gaze upon her, marking the faint tension in her face, in the way her gloved hands clasped tightly together in her lap. He let his eyes travel the length of her, the pale blue of her walking dress, which made him only the more aware of the warm, changeable color of her eyes, and thought, not for the first time, that she bore her fear the way she bore everything else: upright, and without complaint, and with a resolve she seemed not to know she possessed.

"All will be well," she said, half to herself and half to him, given the way she fixed her gaze on the street. "I am sure Lady Warrington knew what she was about, in all of this."

Benedict let out a low chuckle, and she looked at him sharply.