However, when confronted with a moment like this, well, that other life came into clear focus: sordid, all-consuming, wrong. Yet . . .
How it made him feel . . . Well, it made him feel, and he couldn’t resist its siren song.
None of this could he say to his father.
“She’s my, uh”—think. Mistress? No—“uh”—he looked into her curious green eyes and uttered the only word that could make her presence in this house acceptable—“bride.”
Her gasp echoed off oak paneling all the way up to the high, coffered ceiling. Silence, monstrous and shocked to its bones, filled the cavernous room. He’d just told his father, the Duke of Arundel, that a strumpet—or . . . what precisely was she?—was his wife. Two sets of eyes burned into him.
The pendulum clock ticked off another minute of time before the Duke crossed the distance and wrapped his arms around Percy, giving him two manful claps on the back. “Let me be the first to congratulate you.”
Had Percy picked up a note in his father’s voice on the word congratulate? Just a little note of disbelief? Of playing along? His father had always been good at that game when Percy was a child. Whatever pretend world Percy created, his father never missed a step entering it with him.
But his father’s visage betrayed not a hint of irony. Percy almost wished it had, because now . . .
Now he had to follow through with the farce that he’d taken a woman he didn’t know—he wasn’t even clear on her trade. Whore? Dressmaker? Both?—to wife.
The Duke stepped back, and his focus landed on Izzy. Percy’s stomach lurched with nausea. “And does your bride have a name?”
Percy’s mouth opened and shut. Izzy. Women called by the name Izzy didn’t marry into the aristocracy, much less a duke’s line. Surely, a codicil decreed it so.
Green eyes wide and unflinching, she stepped forward. She possessed the most direct gaze Percy had ever beheld. Whether they shone with competition, fear, or purpose, they didn’t shy away. If he didn’t know better, he’d think them the most honest eyes he’d ever encountered. But he did know better.
“My name is Isabel, my lor—”
“Your Grace,” Percy provided. She needed to know that she was the pretend daughter by law to not just any lord, but a duke. What a night. Would there never be an end to it?
“Your Grace.” She dipped in a curtsy, deep and graceful. Where had she learned that particular skill? Not at Number 9. Or the dressmaking shop. Then, where?
The Duke took Isabel’s hand and bussed a courtly kiss onto it. “Enchanted, my dear.”
Enchanted? Panic streaked through Percy. What had he done? Would he never cease to be the family profligate? He found enough presence of mind to ask, “Is Rosebud Cottage available for our use?”
The Duke smiled. “Lucretia instructed the beds be made up with fresh linens only yesterday. She hoped you would join us. Rosebud Cottage only ever awaits your arrival.”
That last sentence sliced through Percy like a cut, jagged and deep, leaving behind the sharp-edged pain of guilt. Percy could only assume the invitation to join this house party lay buried in the stack of unopened social correspondence that he rarely bothered sorting through.
He’d been too long on his own, too long reliant on himself only, to slot back in to the niceties of Society. Nay, not Society, his conscience piped up. Family. The Duke was family, and Percy could do better. Hadn’t this been one of his vows upon his return to England? Yet his determination to exact revenge upon Montfort had taken precedence.
He must do better.
The Duke tapped his morning paper against his leg. “I trust you haven’t forgotten the way?”
Percy nodded, and the Duke cast a parting smile toward Isabel, a name, Percy thought with no small amount of relief, which suited both the woman and the situation infinitely better than Izzy. “Welcome to the family, daughter.”
Percy inhaled the groan that wanted release. He’d made a monumental mistake of epic proportions.
The Duke disappeared down the corridor to his study, where he would read the Morning Chronicle from cover to cover and take his first pot of coffee alone before the rest of the house stirred.
The rustlings of early risers echoed from the servants’ wing. “We need to go,” Percy said to Isabel. He couldn’t face anyone else yet, not until he’d evaluated this turn of events and what it changed.
Actually, the answer was obvious. It had changed everything.
“Follow me.”
He strode to the front entrance, still open from their arrival, and paused beneath the wide, Grecian-columned portico. “Don’t think about bolting,” he said, low and hard, when Isabel stopped beside him. He wasn’t in the mood for nonsense.
“And how do you reckon I do that with a new mother wearing her night-rail, a babe, his wet nurse, and Tilly?” she retorted before brushing around him and joining her rag-tag sisterhood below, a trace of honeysuckle and summer scenting the air behind her.
The consequence of his lie to the Duke hit Percy square in the jaw. He was stuck here, in the country, with his “bride,” leaving Hortense to handle matters in London without him.
How had the night, now day, gotten away from him so entirely?
Chapter 6
Isabel’s eyes flew wide open, and she sat straight up in a high, four-poster bed, breath scraping the back of her lungs in ragged gasps.
Where in the blazes was she?
The previous night crashed over her in a single, powerful wave. She was in Rosebud Cottage, in the bedroom she’d chosen at the farthest end of the corridor, next to Eva and Ariel’s room.
Tension released from her body by slow increments as she took in the coral and amber color palette encasing her in its warm, velvety glow. The furniture was rather ancient, but well-tended. This room looked, smelled, and felt exactly how she imagined the inside of a rosebud looked, smelled, and felt.
Across from her was a large three-paneled window composed of leaded diamond panes, a holdover from the era during which the cottage was built, likely hundreds of years ago. Beyond the window, the green canopy of the surrounding copse of oaks swayed gently in a light breeze, its only sounds a soft, leafy shoosh and the singing of birds. It was almost enough to seduce one into the fairy tale it presented, that the world outside was as inviting and lovely.
Almost.