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Sense under a bonnet was all very well. What he could not say was that the face in his mind was not Lady Barbara’s in a drawing room but a different woman entirely, behind glass and sugar, arguing softly with him about how to bite a slice of pastry.

“I have only just arrived in Brighton,” he said instead. “It would be hasty to settle my entire future on the strength of one lady.”

“Hasty?” His mother sniffed. “You are four-and-twenty, not fourteen.”

He smiled because it was expected. “Then give me a few days, at least, to behave like a man of four-and-twenty. I will observe Lady Barbara with all proper attention.”

He did not add that the attention he most wanted to pay was to a pair of flour-dusted hands on Harley Street. “I am wanted for an hour, Mother,” he said when the fish arrived, mild as a lie told for mercy. “Harcourt’s clerk. The Pavilion steward. Something tedious.” Chester left his napkin on the table and pushed his chair back.

“What about the ladies?” his mother inquired, knife poised. “So many pretty options. I met three more who could be made to do.”

Made. To do. How absolutely… uninteresting.

But the one who was interesting, a baker’s daughter, couldn’t “make do.” And yet he wanted her to the point of admitting as much to himself.

“I’ll try to deserve them later, Mother,” he said, and stood. “Forgive me. Duty.”

He did not define duty and was out the door before his mother could finish the first slur of protests. If she had pressed him, he was not entirely sure which truth would have sounded worse—that he was slipping out on her parade of brides at every opportunity for the sake of flour, or for the sake of the woman who turned it into something he actually wanted.

Chester signaled for his carriage as he accepted his coat from the butler, and ten minutes later, the carriage with the Wyndale crest was rolling along Marine Parade, where dusk turned Brighton genteel and the sea pretended to purr for company so the visitors would like it. Inside, with his hat on the seat beside him and his gloves folded once on his knee, Chester told himself he did not care for headwear and then pictured, in treacherous detail, a ribbon from a large bonnet coming loose under his thumb and her face tilting up, the sort of slow, unthinking move that ended with a kiss if a man was foolish enough to lean in.

He was not a man for haphazard kisses. At four-and-twenty he had perhaps half the experience expected of a duke of his age and consequence; his heart had never been broken, and he had always intended that when he gave himself fully it would be once, and on purpose. He had simply never met a woman who made that intention feel like anything but an elegant theory.

The thought felt tested now. Tested by a girl who knew to order sugar by its coarseness, who wrote in a steady hand fit for a duchess, whose eyes had met his through the brim of a bonnet as if they saw far more than a title, and whose mouth he could too easily imagine tasting more than the sweetness of vanilla custard.

Madness.

The wanting hit like hunger, sharp and embarrassing. Men in his position had made a sport of shop girls and parlor maids for generations; he had watched it often enough to know it for what it was. He refused to put her in that company. If he ever laid a hand to her ribbons, it would not be to steal an hour in the dark and forget her name by morning. It would be for—

He cut the thought off. He could not even find her in his official capacity as Wyndale, much less approach her with such naive ideas. Why would a baker’s daughter want to trade her freedom for a life as a duchess? And his mother and Society would never accept her. It sounded well in fairy tales, but all he had to offer were obligations, duties, and expectations. And the worst was that his mother’s expectations for heirs, his political duties that too often made rich men richer instead of passing fairer laws for all, and his hopes for a love marriage were at odds.

Think of politics, not pretty lips. Think of keeping her flour on the shelves before you dream of touching her.

The carriage slowed and drew up. He had arrived at Darley’s lodgings. He took his hat, stepped down to the gravel path, and mounted the step to the front door. He knocked. A servant opened—young, neat, and very determined not to notice the crest on the carriage behind him. As soon as the Guardian of the Royal Table arrived it was as if Prinny himself were judging the meals.

“Card,” the boy said, the way boys do when someone has trained them to be brave.

Chester handed a plain card with Wyndale in the corner. The boy’s eyes widened a hair, and he vanished with it as if it were capable of exploding.

Footsteps, the murmur of women’s voices, the distant clink of a tea tray. When the door opened again it was onto a small anteroom with respectable chairs and a lady who looked as though she understood respectable things. She was handsome rather than pretty: composed, faintly amused, and with the quick, assessing gaze of a woman who had spent years being the sensible one in other people’s houses.

“I am Lady Florence Beaumont. How may we help you, Your Grace?” she said blithely, which managed to be both introduction and defense.

Beaumont. The name sat in his ear with the faintest prickle of recognition. He had seen it before—in a different ink, on a different desk—with rather less courtesy attached. M. Beaumont, to be precise. The hand that had called him the Flour Duke and lived to sign another page[AR18].

“Beaumont,” he repeated, narrowing his gaze a fraction. “Have we corresponded, Lady Florence? You, or someone writing under your name?”

Her smile stayed in place; her eyes grew carefully blank. “Not to my knowledge, Your Grace. I have written letters to any number of dull people over the years, but I try not to remember the ones who don’t answer.”

Ah, so not her. “I answer,” he said dryly. “There was a letter... On the flour allocations. Very decided views for and against my circular. Signed simply M. Beaumont. I confess, I remembered the phrases more than the hand.” He watched her closely. If Lady Florence was his sharp-tongued correspondent, she hid it very well.

That earned him a small gulp of air and then a laugh that was slightly too bright.

“Oh, that,” she said. “I am afraid you flatter me. I do not write about flour. I eat it in its better incarnations. If the letter was ‘very decided’…” Her gaze slipped sideways, as if dragged. “Then I suspect it was my niece.”

“My condolences,” he said. “The writer called my circular ‘a noose neatly disguised as a ribbon’ and suggested the flour Board I chair preferred strangling small kitchens to steadying them. I did not forget that in a hurry.”

Nor, if he were honest, had he ignored it; the letter had been one of the spurs that pushed him toward coin at noon and away from the very worst excesses the Board preferred.