One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club #1)(115)

Winifred’s voice lowered to a whisper. “Her Grace, the Duchess of Hampstead will be joining us for dinner. I’ve just received the note from one of my dinner guests, Mrs. Nodwell. Her cousin is married to Her Grace’s nephew’s adopted brother, you see?”

Amelia didn’t, but she nodded politely anyway.

Winifred turned back to Laurent, pulling him into the Rose Salon, where servants were removing porcelain cherubs from the shelves and pushing the furniture to the sides of the room. “Obviously,” she said, “I couldn’t decline. And then Mrs. Petersham sent a note round, asking if she might bring her cousins visiting from Bath. I couldn’t say no to them, either. And now these cards keep coming …” She gestured toward the row of calling cards propped on the mantel. “I do believe tonight we’re going to be overrun with Quality.”

“But …” Amelia shook her head to dispel her confusion. “At this time of summer? Why?”

“For you, of course! They all assume you and Morland will be in attendance. Everyone is desperate to see your first public appearance in London since the marriage.” She lifted an eyebrow. “There are some very interesting”—she pronounced each syllable distinctly, EEN-ter-est-ting—“rumors coming out of Oxfordshire, you know.”

A bittersweet smile curved Amelia’s lips. She’d known there would be gossip, after that display at the Granthams’. The memory of that night—the dancing, the lovemaking, the conversation and sweet embraces lasting into morning—it wrung her heart with surprising ferocity. The pain made her think of Spencer’s broken ribs. She hoped they were healing well.

Lord, she missed him, with everything she had.

Moving to the side of the room, she took a seat on a recently relocated footstool. “Well, I fear your guests will be disappointed,” she told Winifred. “I’m not feeling well enough for socializing this evening, and the duke is not even in Town.”

“But he is!”

Amelia’s jaw dropped. “He is?”

“Yes, he arrived this very morning in Mayfair, and the news has already appeared in the afternoon papers.” Winifred snapped her fingers at a footman. “Not there. By the window.”

Amelia quietly reeled, trying not to betray the magnitude of her shock. Spencer was here in Town? Could he have any idea of her own arrival? And what about Claudia? Where was she?

As Winifred went into another flurry of instructions for the servants, Laurent crouched at Amelia’s side. “Shall I have the carriage take you to Morland House?”

“No, no.” She couldn’t see him like this, not yet. She wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t even certain he’d want to see her. “I will send him a note.”

With a few more snaps of Winifred’s fingers, a lap desk and quill materialized before Amelia. The paper was a terrifying expanse of white. She was afraid to lay her pen to it at all, fearful of marring that blank perfection with the wrong word and mucking up everything again. In the end, she simply wrote:

I am here in Town, at my brother’s house. You are invited to dinner this evening.

—A.

There. If he wished to see her, he would know where to find her. Laurent dispatched a runner with the note, and Amelia passed two fretful hours unpacking in her old, modest bedchamber whilst Winifred renovated the downstairs. Finally, just as light was fading, she glimpsed the runner through her open window as he made for the house’s back entrance. She rushed down the service stairs to find the boy.

“Well?” she asked him breathlessly, once she’d collared the youth. He held a folded paper in his hand. “Is that my reply?”

He shook his head no. “The duke weren’t at home, ma’am. Footman told me he’d gone out for a game of cards.”

A game of cards? He’d come back to London just for a game of cards?

“Go back there,” she told the boy. “Find out where he’s gone, and find His Grace to give him that note. Don’t bother coming back until you do.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She released the lad, and he darted off the way he’d come.

Circling one palm over her belly—a habit she’d already developed, even though her abdomen didn’t protrude yet—she took deep breaths and tried to remain calm.

Hours later, she was panicking.

Laurent’s house was crushed, wall to wall, with guests. They’d begun arriving shortly after sundown and continued to stream in even now. The entirety of Bryanston Square was congested with coaches and teams. Most of the recent arrivals didn’t even seem to understand they were lacking an invitation. Amelia wasn’t certain they knew whose house they were at; they were just following the crowd. Winifred’s food had run out hours ago, much to her despair, but her reinforcements of wine and spirits were holding strong for the moment. No one showed the slightest inclination to leave.

In the hall, the hired quartet gamely played over and through the din of rumor and laughter. A few couples carved out enough space to dance a cramped quadrille.

Amelia couldn’t imagine why they all hadn’t given up and gone home hours ago. The duke’s absence was obvious, and tonight she lacked the spirit to compensate with flirtation and witty remarks. Even with every window thrown open to the night air and the barest minimum of candles burning, the air in the rooms was exceedingly close, and Amelia had done her best to seek out the few pockets of relative seclusion. Whenever someone asked after Spencer, she murmured a few words of excuse. Recently arrived in town, delayed by business … et cetera.