Chapter Twenty-One

Despite having prohibited herself from turning tail, Patience wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole. A dark one. Populated by sweet and innocent magical beings that would care for her and never speak of England because they’d never heard of it and didn’t care whether the country existed or not.

She left the ballroom with her head held high, but the moment she was safe in the darkened room, she leaned against a wall and wilted. The sensational and lurid reports of the upper ten thousand figured heavily into her mother’s daily pleasures.

Now Patience had gone and secured a place in the columns herself. She could already hear the words in her head. A printer’s daughter of no birth and distinction was present last night at a certain ball hosted by Lord and Lady R and was overheard in a verbal tussle with a very distinguished duke. One can only guess at how the creature came to be there in the first place. Was she invited? Or did she sneak in through the servants’ entrance?

Only it would be worse, wouldn’t it? Those writers had a way of making every word sound ripe with sneer for those they despised.

What was she going to do?

The Haunted Tower might need a new villain. He’d never see himself represented in print, but it would make her happy. Already a little smile blossomed on her lips at the idea.

“Oh, Miss Emery!”

Patience started and righted herself, tensing as if preparing for another battle, and hid her trembling hands behind her back.

The woman of the house swept into the room, holding herself with a stately bearing. She had an open countenance, light-brown hair, and a motherly air. Lady Reyne.

Lady Reyne’s lips had that pinched look that Patience knew only too well on her mother’s face. Really, did women have some training in facial expressions when they…well, not when they became mothers, because Lady Reyne was childless, but perhaps when they reached a certain age. Lady Reyne was almost forty.

All Patience’s mother’s aspirations toward a higher social status ended here.

“My lady, may I beg leave to ap—”

“That horrid man. He deserves to wake up in a bed of rotting herring with fish innards dried in his hair.”

Patience’s mouth promptly shut again. Whether it was the unexpected image or the person expressing such imaginative disdain, it was difficult to tell. But Patience was robbed of the ability to speak.

Without warning, Lady Reyne swept Patience into her arms. “I can’t believe the things he said to you. And in front of my guests. Duke or no, he will not be allowed to enter these doors ever again. Wretched, wretched man. He doesn’t have the manners of a diseased gutter rat.”

Patience squeezed her eyes shut and went lax, relaxing into the comfort. Wasn’t this what she should have been accepting from her mother?

“You inspired me, Miss Emery, truly you did. I’ve wanted to stand up for myself in that exact fashion for many a year, but I’ve always held my tongue on the grounds that I must be a lady first or that I can’t embarrass my husband. Then tonight you…” She took a step back and beamed at Patience, pride in her sympathetic eyes, a rosy glow to her cheeks. “You were magnificent.”

“I was? I mean…well, I…” Patience reached up to rub the back of her neck, realized what she’d done, and put her hand down by her side again.

“The nerve of him coming here and trying to intimidate you. Oh, I’m so angry I could just—”

She glanced over her shoulder at the new arrival and abruptly stopped short, features hardening.

The person entering was a tall man about Lady Reyne’s age. Maybe a little older or a little younger. It was difficult to tell. Lady Reyne certainly wasn’t pleased to see him; her look could have set off winter in July.

“Your Grace.” She gave a curt nod.

Another duke? Patience barely refrained from wrinkling her nose. Why did such a large fraction of the few dukes England boasted have to be here in this ballroom tonight? And were they all members of some sort of…duke alliance? Would this one be taking her to task for what she’d done to his brethren?

“Lady Reyne.” The man bowed before them. He was deliberate in all of his movements. There was a quietness about him that seemed…deceptive. As if there were much, much more behind the surface than met the casual observer’s notice. His eyes, for one. His gaze was level and direct and seemed to swallow everything it landed upon. “And this is Miss Emery, I suppose? You’re quite a sensation in the ballroom.”

Lady Reyne, with obvious reluctance, made proper introductions. The man was the Duke of Holbrook. He was…tall. Reserved, too, but with the quiet innocence of a metal spring wound far beyond intended capacity.

“I was rash and unforgivably caught up in the heat of the moment.”

Holbrook. Holbrook. Patience turned the name over in her mind. Had she ever heard it connected with Ashcroft?

She heaved a weary sigh. Oh, how she would pay for her conduct. Would her mother ever forgive her? This would be remembered forever. She would be stained with scandal forever. Forever and ever and ever. It couldn’t possibly be any worse.

So many years of trying to hide and blend in with her surroundings were difficult to overcome. The thought of having made herself notorious was almost enough to make her want to flee to a convent.

Except for the obvious reason that she’d never have the chance to be with a man again. Ashcroft was lost to her, but there was still the option she’d been thinking about the night she met Ashcroft—the one about being able to hire a man to pleasure her the way men hired women.

“His Grace is a particular friend of my husband.” Lady Reyne’s mouth pinched again as if this were distasteful.

“I think we have a friend in common, Miss Emery,” the duke said in a low drawl.

“Oh, I don’t know Lord Reyne at all, sir.” Immediately, her face scorched at her blunder. Was she an English miss, or was she some hayseed from the wilds of the New World? For years she’d resented Mr. Wilshire for his errors and here she was blundering along herself, not with the common folk, but a duke. “Your Grace, that is. Pray forgive me.”

How could she have done unspeakable things with a marquess and be reduced to this ninny here with Holbrook?

The duke wasn’t Ashcroft. No. Ashcroft was…a man and a pagan god, but always both so powerfully at the same time. He made her realize depths to herself she didn’t know could exist. Made her feel every inch a woman. Hierarchy was nothing when they were together, nothing more than an absurd construct of a strange and foreign world to which they’d once been a part. Or to which she’d once been a part. Ashcroft was somehow above it all.

Holbrook, by contrast, was pure duke. He made her remember she was a commoner, and secretly the daughter of a foundling nobody, who didn’t belong. Not now. Not ever.

It wasn’t malicious, what he made her feel. It was simply the enormity of his stature, which he wore effortlessly.

If he made note of her blunder, he made no outward show. “I would like a moment alone with Miss Emery, if you don’t mind, my lady.”

Lady Reyne looked like she did mind…terribly—that she would like nothing less, in fact, and would refuse the request. Instead, she gave a single terse nod. “All right, but I’m staying on the other side of the room.”

As if Patience would need a chaperone.

Then again—her cheeks went hot again—she’d done all the things chaperones were supposed to prevent.

Holbrook spoke in low murmurs. “I think you should know that Ashcroft is not well.”

“It’s true, then?”

“About his arm? Yes.”

“Was it his father who did it?”

“I don’t know. He won’t speak of it.”

There was a pause. Patience looked up. It wouldn’t do to pretend she and Ashcroft weren’t something to one another. In fact, it was something of a relief to be able to own it. “You don’t seem surprised by me, Your Grace.”

“Miss Emery?”

“You know of his proclivities?”

“I won’t pretend I don’t know what you mean.” He spoke with perfectly level smoothness, ever the picture of all a duke ought to be. “But believe me, I don’t see you as a proclivity. I see you as a person. And so does Ashcroft.”

Patience was leaving the room to rejoin the guests when Mr. Wilshire appeared, righting himself from where he’d been studying a potted orange tree placed in front of a door to deter unwanted guests. No doubt the man had been waiting for her. Just what she needed. “Prudence, dear—”

“Patience. My name is Patience.” She was about to tell him that he could bloody well call her Miss Emery as was proper, when he interrupted.

“I prefer Prudence. And when we’re married—”

Patience veritably squeaked, her voice shooting up to a painful pitch. “When we’re what?”

She didn’t have time to process the fact that he’d blithely suggested he could change her name to suit his whim. Change her name.

“Don’t pretend it will be otherwise.” In the look he gave her—the smile a touch too wide—she could all but hear him chanting to himself, It’s all right if she’s fat because I will become accustomed to it in time.

Patience’s eyes narrowed, and her teeth set. How dare he? If he didn’t care for her shape—fine. It didn’t matter one whit. Besides, what he liked and didn’t was absolutely none of her business.

But he could not treat her like she was an object of sympathy. She needed his pity like she needed her ears sliced off her head. She took a deep breath, trying not to seethe…and failing. Miserably. “Oh, no, sir, you don’t have the authority to decide—”

With annoyance on his pinched face, he interrupted her. “You know you must do as your parents wish.”

Patience didn’t have time for this nonsense. “I hope you wake up with fins and rotting fish eyes in your hair.”

He made a face of disgust and drew back. “What?”

Well, it wasn’t exactly as Lady Reyne had phrased it, but Patience’s mind spun with too great a force to do anything but catch what words it could grab ahold of and hope for the best when she flung them from her tongue.

She returned for the supper dance. A gentleman by the name of Mr. Gray Mason had claimed her. Once he’d taken her to dine, he’d said, “I don’t know whether to let you have one whole table spread for yourself or express my disapproval of you by allowing you naught but one small bite from a single dish.”

And then he’d laughed uproariously at his supposed wit.

Taken by surprise, Patience nearly drowned, shocked and silent, under a wave of excruciating humiliation. Having so recently stood up to Silverlund amplified the mortification of being rendered mute by this worm.

And later, after she’d departed the ball, a myriad of biting replies, each stunning and more dazzling than the last, buzzed around her mind. Of course.