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His campaign to win her hand reeled through his head. He planned to request the first waltz in precisely five days. His plan branched thereafter, depending on whether she refused his request, or wouldn’t speak to him while dancing, etcetera.

“I took the liberty of sending Jacobs for your curricle,” Duckworthy said while Giles was still staring at the sheet of paper.

Giles was waiting in the street, tapping his whip against his leg, when his curricle swept around the corner from the mews. “With me,” he bit out, and his groom dashed around to jump on the back.

It was challenging to drive at speed when London streets were crowded, but it took all his concentration, which was to the good. If he began to think about why Yasmin had summoned him, he ran the risk of collision.

At the Duke of Portbellow’s mansion, he tossed the reins to his groom and told him to drive back to his stables. Once in the door, he handed his coat to Carson. “Lady Yasmin?”

“She’s in the morning room, Lord—”

Giles jerked open the door. He strode into the room and looked about.

Yasmin was asleep.

She was seated in a large armchair turned to face the fireplace. When he walked across the room, she didn’t stir. Her head leaned against one wing of the chair, her hair rumpled like gleaming silk, her eyelashes lying on her cheek like a golden fringe.

He crouched down in front of her, his fingers clenched against the urge to touch her. Instead, he looked at her carefully. When she was awake, he found himself absorbed by her eyes, cataloguing the way they sparkled when she giggled, the way they shone with joy when they spun in a waltz.

Now her cheeks were white. She looked thinner, almost drawn. Her eyes had faint blue circles beneath them. What had his girl done to herself in the past few days?

Without hesitation, he leaned forward and scooped her up, tucking her against his chest. Yasmin’s indefinable perfume drifted to his nose, and his whole body relaxed. One of her hands curled confidingly against him, but her eyelashes didn’t even flutter. Instead, she muttered something and turned her head into his chest.

He realized he was smiling.

Giles rarely smiled: the expression resulted from emotions that he’d eschewed long ago as undignified and unnecessary. Yet his mouth was curving without sardonic or sarcastic intent.

He headed for the door. Thankfully, Carson was no idiot. The butler backed away into the corridor.

Yasmin’s grandfather emerged from the opposite room. “Good morning, Lord Lilford.”

Giles nodded warily. He didn’t intend to put Yasmin down if her grandfather asked him to, but he’d rather not have a confrontation.

“My granddaughter has been acting like someone with a broken heart,” the duke said gruffly.

“She summoned me.” He couldn’t help the sprig of hope in his heart. Perhaps Yasmin had changed her mind about not marrying him.

Her grandfather quirked an eyebrow. “At breakfast she informed me that she would be hovering at my deathbed, devoted and unmarried. I didn’t tell her that I have no plan to die before I meet my great-grandchildren.”

Giles nodded. “Where shall I bring her?”

“You may carry her upstairs. Top of the stairs, second to the right.”

Yasmin’s bedchamber was papered in cream silk, hand-painted with sprays of rosy dogwood blossoms. The bed was made up with pale pink linen, with mounds of fluffy pillows that seemed utterly unnecessary to Giles, and yet utterly delightful. Next to the fireplace was a haphazard stack of books; beside it was a wide bowl full of buttons and another that seemed to be filled with twists of silk. Glancing at the window, he realized that it was covered with strings decorated with silk twists. Like kite strings, only far prettier and more delicate.

The room was so feminine, unlike his bedchamber, that he froze for a moment, looking around, then back down at the woman in his arms.

Yasmin lived a life that was purposefully beautiful, a strange, interesting thought.

As a man who would inherit an ancient title and seat in the House of Lords, he had been trained to live a life that was purposefully discreet and devoted to duty. His own preferences had been irrelevant; his parents’ scandals combined with his ancestry shaped everything he did.

He walked across the room and sank into one of two cream-colored armchairs. Yasmin sighed and nestled against him, so he rested his chin on her hair and thought about that inheritance. A comment of Lydia’s had been niggling the back of his mind.

Perhaps, without realizing it, his obsession with the reputation of his future wife did spring from the fact that he may not have the requisite blue blood. For most aristocrats, duty stemmed from knowledge of their ancestry.

Perhaps Silvester was free to act as he wished, because he had his late father’s nose.

Yasmin didn’t open her eyes for long minutes.