Page 82 of A Deal with her Forbidden Duke
“Are you enjoying it?”
She nodded eagerly. “Are you?”
“I am,” he told her. “It reminds me of coming here with my mother. She would use her Galilean binoculars, and she would hold them up to my eyes.Look, she would tell me.Do you see the sets they use to tell a story, Alexander?”
He smiled softly.
“I always told her I could understand the stories, but I never could.”
“I am sure she told you anyway,” Madeleine said.
“Of course she did.” He gave a gentle chuckle.
“My father was loveless, as I have mentioned. He was… he was a gambler, and that was his downfall. That, and wishing to rise within theton.That is the way with those sorts of men with such a penchant.”
Alexander nodded, his thoughts drifting to yet another man in her life who had fallen to gambling.
And there he was, the owner of a place where men like Madeleine’s father, or her former husband, met their downfalls.
He swallowed.
“Are you all right?” she asked, frowning.
“Yes,” he said but his voice was thin.
“What of your father?” she asked.
He almost laughed aloud.
I imagine our fathers saw one another at the gambling hell that I own.
Yet he was saved by the spotlight returning to the stage, signaling the next part of the performance.
“Mademoiselle Giselle is about to come back onstage,” he muttered. “You should not be distracted.”
Madeleine giggled, leaning into him, unmindful for once of the eyes on them.
He should have been happy for that but he felt too exposed, so close to revealing his secret business. Too close to the words that might turn her tentative affection to hatred.
His heart clenched.
“I thought you wished to bestow a distraction upon me.”
“And I am captivated by watching you watch the opera, you must indulge me.” He tried to sound smooth, as he often did with her, but his voice faltered.
Madeleine frowned for a moment and pulled back. But she only looked around, as if she reasoned it was to be proper in public.
Her eyes turned back to the stage, and Alexander breathed easier for a while.
What of your father?
The question rang through his mind over and over for the remainder of the opera.
And when they returned to Silverton that night, Alexander was too darkly lost in his thoughts to emerge from them long enough to remain undistracted.
He knew he had to tell her about the Raven’s Den.
Once he got the art exhibit over with, he would tell her everything.
