Page 42 of When her Duke Returns
“All right. I shall leave you to your things and fetch Cluett. Should you see him before I do, let him know I’m looking for him and need to dress. The men at the club will not forgive me for my tardiness,again.”
With a squeeze of his hand, Mary urged Antony out of the room. The two of them swept down the stairs to thepiano nobilethen parted ways. Hatton House was not so grand that she would not find her family in due time. Soon enough, she came upon a trail of voices from one of the dressing rooms by the staff entrance though the door was uncharacteristically shut to a close.
Mary grimaced and levered her ear to the door. She heard Harry laugh from within and pushed it open without another thought, calling for him as she entered. She gasped as an unimaginable tableau of lust unfolded before her.
Harry was pressed against the back wall of the room between an armoire and a closed window. His auburn hair was tousled about his head, his shirt drawn from his breeches, and a flush of pink set firmly along his cheekbones. Mr. Cluett, Antony’s valet, was standing in front of him, holding him flush against the wall. They were locked in a tight embrace, and Mary didn’t have to ask to know what was going on.
“M—Mary!” Harry exclaimed, pushing himself away from the valet and buttoning his trousers as hastily as he could. His face had gone bright red under the lazy sun of the afternoon, and the young and handsome Mr. Cluett was just as startled.
Mary could not look away. “I was… looking for…I mean, I was… I should go,” she mumbled and felt her face grow hot as well.
Cluett drew his hands over his face as Harry continued to straighten up. “Victor was—Mr. Cluett, rather, was helping me into a… finicky suit, you see. He was helping me dress.”
“Helping youdress?” Mary repeated though she could hardly look her brother in the eye nor make any sense of the scene.
Harry sighed and took a step forward. “Really it’s not what you—”
At that, and seeming mightily concerned with other business, Antony trailed in from the hallway, stopping dead in his tracks as he caught sight of the two disheveled men and his beetroot-faced betrothed.
“Harry?Cluett? What on earth is going on?”
ChapterSeventeen
“Things seem colored all shades of terrible in Porto,” Sir Tristan began, mulling over the recent happenings inthe London Chroniclein the sunroom of Richon House. “One can only hope they nip this conflict in the bud before it spreads any closer.”
Lady Stanton lifted her eyes from her correspondence and swept a ring of blonde hair from her cheek. “Must we speak of such things over our eggs? The Duke will think us quite uncivilized,” she added and shot an apologetic look to Alexander from across the dining table.
The man forced a smile and looked to his right where Cecelia was sitting in melancholy, prodding at a piece of toast on her plate. They had spent two months in awkward silence, and he knew the charade would only survive so long.Howlong, he could not guess—certainly not the span of one’s lifetime.
“It’s all right,” Alexander said absently to Lady Stanton, drawing his attention back to their breakfast. “It’s no bother to me.”
“I imagine it must be quite troublesome to consider further war, what with your time abroad,” Sir Tristan added, his gaze settling upon the bandages on Alexander’s face.
“Oh, father,please!” Cecelia urged meekly. “Leave him be.”
Sir Tristan set his newspaper down. “You must forgive me, Your Grace. I find myself rather carried away in the presence of other gentlemen—a rarity in our neck of the woods as you have surely noted.”
Alexander swallowed down his derision. He longed desperately to conclude their stay in East Anglia and make for London on his own. He had nary secured a moment to himself since the whirlwind at Whitcliff, pulled about this way and that by his grandmother and would-be-father-in-law, who looked at him with the quiet curiosity.
Months after the fact, he still struggled with the strangeness of his match: a duke set to wed the daughter of a baronet. Nothing of its like had unfolded in Rowe history. It was not that the Stantons were without money—quite the opposite—but his grandmother had always advocated the protection of one’s titles and good breeding above all else.
Before he could consider the matter further, Lady Stanton let out a gasp. “How lovely! A letter from Lady Carlisle!”
Alexander felt the bile rise in his throat at the mention of the name, and Cecelia stirred to speak beside him. “Lady Mary’s mother? What does it say?”
Her mother hummed and drew a finger over the note. “Nothing of note thus far but a run-in with the most dreadful seamstress and… Oh!”
Cecelia quirked her brow. “Oh?” she echoed.
Lady Stanton began to read. “We’re traveling eastward up to Scotland for the wedding and will be stopping in Suffolk on the seventeenth…And,” she continued, skipping over the phrases that were of no interest,“we shall call on you in the afternoon of…Not important…and join you at Cecelia’s engagement dinner alongside Antony and Mary, who are most excited to attend, should it—”
“Mary is coming here?” Cecelia squawked, cutting her mother off mid-sentence.
“Well, of course.”
Cecelia turned to Alexander. “Did you invite them?”
“I most certainly did not,” he replied, feeling about as betrayed as she looked. “I’ve no notion of any engagement dinner, either.”
