Page 61 of Forget Me Not

The dance came to a close with them standing side by side, hands clasped. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Well done, sweeting.”

Precisely what he’d said to her when they would practice the dance as children.Well done, sweeting.She had lived for that praise as a little girl. Why, then, did it hurt a little to hear it now?

“I concede,” Mr. Barrington said. “The allemande is a very elegant dance.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Layton added.

Lucas looked to her. “Shall we dance it at Falstone Castle and fill all the guests with this same awe?”

To her mortification, emotion clogged her throat, emotion she couldn’t truly identify or explain. She rushed from the room, through Lucas’s chamber, down the corridor, down the stairs, and out of the house.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Why does she keep doingthat?” Lucas asked after Julia’s flight.

“She has run from you before?” Digby asked.

He counted off the incidents on his fingers. “When I first returned to Lampton Park, when our parents announced our betrothal, when I asked her not to rearrange the furniture in this room, when we returned from our day of mountaineering...”

“Gads, man.” Digby looked to Kes. “You should have sent for me sooner.”

“He sent for you? He assumed I would bungle my marriage?”

Digby shrugged. “You are standing here chatting with the two of us instead of chasing after your distraught wife.”

Lucas was reaching the end of his wits, and these two louts were having fun at his expense. “The two of you are supposed to be helping me.”

“And you are supposed to be courting Julia,” Kes said. “Your failure overshadows ours.”

“There’s not much I can do to make Julia want to spend time with me instead of—”

“Running down the corridor?” Kes supplied dryly.

Digby rolled his eyes—the only adult of Lucas’s acquaintance who regularly did so. “I watched her while the two of you were dancing. Hers was the expression of a lady who is not indifferent to her husband.”

“There are a great many flavors of ‘not indifferent.’ Which does she seem to be leaning toward?”

“The one that says, ‘If I run from the room, by all means, follow after me.’” Digby waved him off impatiently.

In perfect unison, Digby and Kes both said, “Go!”

Heaven help him if they were wrong.

He followed Julia’s path but realized upon leaving his bedchamber that he didn’t know where she had gone from there. He crossed the antechamber to her room and peered inside.

She wasn’t there either, but he didn’t leave immediately. The room hadn’t changed since her very first day. Even the desk she’d wanted to put in the balcony room that they had moved in tothisroom was now gone. Surely he’d been clear that she was welcome to—oughtto, in fact—personalize her bedchamber. Why hadn’t she? How could she possibly feel like this was her home if there was nothing of her in it?

“Lucas.” That was Kes.

“I’m in here,” he called out.

Kes popped his head inside. “We spotted your runaway wife. She’s on the back lawn being herded by that mischievous dog of yours.”

Bless Pooka.

Lucas rushed out, not slowing his steps until he, too, was on the back lawn. Pooka was running literal circles around a bemused Julia. The sight brought a smile to Lucas’s face. His ever-faithful dog was helping him keep pace with his ever-elusive wife.

He popped his forefinger and thumb in his mouth and let forth a quick whistle. Pooka changed course on the instant and ran to him, tail wagging frantically.

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