Page 79 of The Duke Who Loved Me (The Duke's Estates 1)

“I heard.”

“Want me to cut him? Serve him right, the sneak. I never liked the fellow.”

“That isn’t necessary,” said James.

This earned him a critical look. “If you say so,” replied the dandy. “But I must tell you the shine on your boots is not up to your usual standard.”

James marveled at how much less he cared about this than in the past. Which was not to say he carednothing. He would find someone to give the Hessians a proper gleam.

“Care to toddle along to the club with me?” Crawdon asked.

“Sorry, I have an engagement.”

“Very well. Oh! That prince of yours has been kicking up a fuss.”

“Hardly mine,” said James in his most thoroughly bored tone.

“You did have that set-to.”

“A momentary lapse.” James made a dismissive gesture.

“Right. Foreigners, eh?” Crawdon touched his hat brim and walked off.

James turned in the opposite direction and set off for Cecelia’s home. He couldn’t remember when he’d made so many morning calls. In the past he’d found them tedious beyond belief. How strangely things changed.

Cecelia was surprised when the footman announced James. At any other time her heart might have leapt at the news of his arrival. But today he was the last in a string of visitors who had tried her patience to the breaking point. All of them had been sly gossips probing for tidbits about Prince Karl, looking for cracks in her facade. And there seemed nothing she could say to dispel the miasma of innuendo. Whatever she did, the ground shifted beneath her feet. If she denied, she was protesting too much. If she pretended nothing unusual had occurred, she was evasive and deceptive. Blank incomprehension only roused more probing. And feigning stupidity was both foreign and repugnant to her. Aunt Valeria had actually tried to help. But she was abrupt and clumsy. And the sudden abandonment of her pretended deafness bewildered several visitors. She had finally fled to her beehives.

This had made for an extremely trying morning, and yet Cecelia hadn’t thought it wise to refuse callers. To shut herself away would look like cowardice, or guilt. And so she’d put on her brightest gown, had her hair dressed in careless ringlets, and spent the morning stifling her anger. Now it hovered like storm clouds about to break.

So when James strolled in, wearing an impeccable dark-blue coat and pale pantaloons, with a fresh haircut, looking every inch the nonpareil, Cecelia’s heart did not melt. Rather she resented his careless nonchalance. “You’re back,” she said.

“I am.” He sat down beside her on the sofa as if he’d naturally been invited to do so.

No one would have associated this man of fashion with the dusty, disheveled fellow throwing broken-down furniture out a window. He looked like the old James, and Cecelia felt a tremor of unease. The old James had not noticed the plight of poor children or been full of gratitude for scones or dressed up in old-fashioned robes and paraded about. He had certainly never kissed her. He had looked down his nose and called her the bane of his existence. Had that James returned? If he had, she frankly could not bear it just now. And why had he chosen this inopportune day to emerge? When he was all too likely to hear things. “I am rather tired,” she said. “What do you want?”

He looked startled, as well he might, she supposed. “I beg your pardon,” she added. “I have a wretched headache.”

He seemed about to speak, hesitated, then gave a slight shake of his head. “I’ve come to invite you to attend a play tomorrow evening with me and Lady Wilton,” he said.

Words slipped out before Cecelia thought. “Going to Vauxhall with Lady Wilton created this whole tangle in the first place.”

“What?”

She hadn’t meant to say that. She didn’t want him to know…anything. Particularly not about Prince Karl’s kiss. He mustn’t ever… And then something in James’s expression showed Cecelia that he’d already heard the gossip and was here because of it. She flushed as a host of implications raced through her mind. “You need not do this,” she said.

“Ask you to a play?”

She was sick of sly implications and fencing with words. “When you never have before? We both know why you’re doing it, James.”

“I’m doing it because you need help,” he answered.

He might have said something that heartened or soothed her. Cecelia imagined that was possible. This was not it, however. Had she become a charity case now for the Corinthian, the newly minted duke, the handsomest man in England? “I will manage for myself.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

She heard the old James in these words—the impatient, dismissive James of so many of their disputes. “That is my problem, not yours.”

“Brazen it out until the talk passes, I suppose.”

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