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Nina’s throat felt dry. Perhaps the duke acted for the wrong reasons. But even so . . .
“Won’t Italy do your nephew good? All the blue sky and pure air.”
Stark lines carved down around Alan’s lips. “In my experience, the ills of exile outweigh the benefits of the particular environment.”
The hairs stood up on her arms. He’d gone too rigid, as though braced beneath an unendurable weight.
“Your experience.” She took a breath. He’d mentioned its outline—the journey from country to country, chasing a cure he didn’t need—but he hadn’t filled in the details. Looking at him, the ice kept spreading from her chest, crackling through her veins. How bad had it been?
“I don’t understand, of course, what it was like,” she began.
“No point in trying,” he interrupted, so coldly the icy feeling spiked all the way to her fingertips. “It defies understanding.”
She began again, the memory of Claud’s hectic eyes spurring her on. “You weren’t consumptive, though. And Claud . . .” This time she stopped herself, as color leached from his face.
“Claud is consumptive?” His gaze was as cold as his voice. “I’ve heard no affirmation from Dr. Thayer, and if I did, I doubt I’d find it convincing. West End physicians are biddable creatures. They diagnose in response to social cues as much as science. I will decide the best course for Claud. He’s not going to Italy, to Pistoia of all places.”
She stepped forward, the impulse to soothe materializing with no sure path to travel. She returned to her cushion on the settle. He followed her with his eyes. She opened her mouth, but he shook his head, dismissing the subject.
“It’s love,” he said, and her heart flipped, even though his tone was scathing.
“According to Geoffrey,” he continued. “A great love that he shares with Patricia, Lady Kilderbee. Our fathers were friends, with neighboring country houses. Both spendthrifts. Geoff and Patricia would meet in the beechwood and bemoan their fates. Geoff poured out the whole story to me after our father’s funeral. The straitened young duke required an heiress. But the equally impoverished Patricia was his very soul.”
“That’s the reason you gave over those investments.” She could hardly believe it. “Because he told you he was in love?”
“I enjoy theater.” His lips curled. “Romantic drama in particular, and the stormier the better. I felt compelled to introduce another plot point. And frankly, I preferred the normality of the new arrangement—my elder brother, the duke, disbursing funds as a duty. Rather than a fortune I’d earned selling properties that pity conferred upon me.”
Sitting there, chest broad, folded arms swelled with muscle, teeth bared, he looked not like a man to be pitied, but a man to be feared. She felt a frisson of excitement, chased by disquiet.
“They decided not to marry, though,” she said. “Each other, I mean.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Love matches aren’t the aristocratic way. Neither are business enterprises. I couldn’t guarantee my investments would yield as much as they did. And regardless, the dukedom’s debts were considerable. Geoff would have needed to reduce expenditures. He made his choice as a duke, not a man.” His lips tipped into a contemptuous smirk.
“You mean he chose to make himself miserable.”
“And he makes others miserable, which concerns me more.” His eyes had turned stone gray. He focused those eyes on her. The force of his gaze pressed the air from her lungs.
“Do we have an agreement, then?” He extended his hand. “I won’t ask any more questions about your brother.” He paused, considering. “Or about your friends at the knickknack emporium. You’ll stay here until we’ve completed our exchange. And you won’t attempt to contact Reeve.”
Her heart pounded in her ears. Was she selling out her brother to buy her own freedom? She’d thought, perhaps, a letter to Hensthorpe, dropped in the pillar box, to apprise Jack of the situation, to explain. He might be expecting her . . . waiting for her.
She could refuse Alan’s bargain, but refusing would do Jack no good. And she’d lose all. She was shaking as she nodded, as she took Alan’s hand. His fingers tightened around hers.
They looked at each other. It was a twisted agreement, odd, awkward, and morally gray. They were allies and enemies. And hell’s bells, she wanted nothing more than to crawl back into his lap. “I don’t know how I’ll get anywhere near those letters.” She withdrew her hand. “I doubt the duke will rehire me. If that was your plan.”
“Oh no,” said Alan, and the quirk of his lips became a very crooked smile. “You are going to enter Umfreville House on my arm, when we attend the duchess’s ball.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The next several days flurried with activity. The first notable outing was to a lovely Georgian home, redbrick with crimson window arches. After Casa De’Ath, the interior struck Nina as pointedly conventional in its elegance: rich wood paneling and white plasterwork, vase after vase of gardenias. Alan nodded to the butler and led the way to the back garden himself, where he intercepted the owner of the house, shoveling in the shrubberies.
He and Neal Traymayne were on the most familiar terms, and that familiarity extended instantly to her.
“You’re Nina.” Neal addressed her with such obvious delight, she wondered what Alan had communicated by letter—or hadn’t. “Did you work this transformation?” He squinted at Alan, barbered and crisply tailored, then grinned and swung his shovel over his shoulder. “This way.”
He whistled as they passed between the purple lilac and the yellow laburnum into the wild heart of the garden, the most spectacular garden Nina had ever seen. It was small but so varied and seemingly haphazard that it gave the impression of immense, untrammeled space. Dandelions grew in sunny profusion. Only the rose-swathed trellis showed signs of the impeccable manicuring the whole must have required. The woman writing beneath the trellis at a wrought-iron table was impeccably manicured herself, from her blond coiffure to the pointed toes of her ribboned boots. That was Neal’s wife, Lavinia, who’d agreed to ready Nina for the Duchess of Umfreville’s ball.
After Neal made their introduction, Lavinia rose, took Nina’s arm, and marched her out from under the trellis into the early-afternoon sun. She stepped back, and to the right, and to the left, sizing Nina up.
