Page 81 of Tamed By her Duke

So, instead, she spent the following two days at the modiste’s, securing herself a ball gown that was at the peak of fashion, no detail overlooked—and which was exorbitantly expensive, given the rush.

“I do hope you’re prepared to bear the cost of insisting we go to this dreadful thing,” Grace had said one evening as she brushed her hair while her husband lounged on her bed. They were still maintaining separate bedchambers, but this was becoming more and more like a pretense. They went to bed together, they rose together.

And now Caleb was watching her prepare for bed, which felt even more intimate, in some ways, then allowing him into her body.

It didnotmean anything.

“I’ll bide,leannan,” he told her, through half-lidded eyes. “Ye do seem to forget I’m a duke, with the coffers to prove it. One frock shan’t break me, no matter how fancy. Now, do come to bed.”

The dresswasrather magnificent, she had to admit as she got dressed and primped for the ball. It had been an absolute nightmare to put on—poor Mrs. O'Mailey had spent near on half an hour wrestling with the thing. Taking it off would no doubt be just as challenging…though, if Grace’s suspicions were correct, that would be Caleb’s problem.

She would, however, be forced to murder him if he tried to cut throughthisdress.

Grace never could have gotten away with Blackmuir House colors at a London ball, let alonethisLondon ball—they were too bold, too arresting. The blue, however, she could incorporate and did. The main silk of her frock was the deep azure, only a shade or two different from her husband’s eyes. That color would have been still a touch too bold, even for a married woman, so she’d muted it slightly with an overlay of pale lace, which was thicker at the top, leaving her bodice nearly silver-white, and thinner at the bottom of the gown, letting the blue peek out more and more the further down you went. When she moved, the effect was like the waves of the sea.

The North Sea, she thought privately. No other.

She wore a necklace of orange and brown garnets; similar gems peeked from her coiffure, nearly blending in with her hair, but not quite.

It was a statement, but only one that her husband—and perhaps his housekeeper, judging by the knowing glint in her eye—could read.

When Caleb saw her in all her finery, his hands stilled, though he’d been in the process of fastening his plaid at his shoulder.

He took her in for a long moment before he spoke.

“Ye’re looking very fine, Grace,” he said.

Somehow, this gruff understatement made her blush to her toes.

When they encountered her friends at the ball, Diana and Emily exclaimed over her gown—and she over theirs. Diana was resplendent in a pale sage green, while Emily looked more beautiful than any debutante in a cream gown dotted with pink accents.

Frances, whose ice blue gown complimented her fiery hair, smiled, though there was reservation in her gaze.

“You look marvelous,” she murmured. “But don’t let your mother see you, maybe. She has already informed me that blue is an uninspired choice that indicates a weakness of spirit.”

It was horrid, how her father’s words so often came from her mother’s lips, Grace thought.

“That’s terrible,” she said. “You look wonderful, and she’s awful for saying it. I can’t believe Evan stood for it.”

“Oh, he doesn’t know,” Frances said hastily. “I’ll tell him eventually…but maybe after we leave. He’s already tense enough as it is.”

Grace nodded in understanding. “I won’t say a word.”

Frances gave her hand a grateful squeeze before melting back into the crowd to return to her husband’s side.

She had a perfectly terrible time though dinner, and the first round of dancing, the latter of which was only somewhat improved by standing at her husband’s side and watching him glower at any gentleman who dared approach her until they slunk away.

“As delightful as it is to observe your power to terrorize aristocrats,” she observed after several rounds of this, “it does not necessarily help us make an unobtrusive escape later.”

Caleb sighed like she really did ask too much of him.

“Fine,” he said.

True to his word, he very pointedly did not glower when Andrew and Benedict—clearly both at their wives’ exhortations—asked her for a dance. Only Evan seemed to have asked for his own sake.

As she waltzed with Andrew—who, she thought, really ought to be friends with Caleb, if only to compare glowering techniques—she thought about how much things had changed.

When she’d been a debutante, she’d loved events like this. She’d danced with everyone, had laughed, flirted, had fun. When she’d returned from her time away, she’d dreaded Society events so much that they made her stomach ache. Yet she’d still accepted every dance asked of her, fearing the gossip if she declined.

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