A Secret Affair

She frowned—and then smiled.

“The king has not forgotten about Ainsley Park,” she said, “or about you.”

“Good Lord,” he said with a grimace. “You did not remind him, did you?”

“He was complaining about St. James’s Palace, which he heartily dislikes,” she said, “and wondering if Buckingham House might be made into a more imposing royal residence. I suggested the Tower of London and mentioned the fact that I had been there today with my dearest friend and with you as an escort.”

“Prinny as lord of the Tower,” he said. “The mind boggles, does it not? He would probably have Traitor’s Gate opened for business again, and parade all his enemies inside to the dungeons.”

“England would be an empty country,” she said. “There would be no one left to run the government, except the king himself. The halls of Parliament would be left to the bats and the ghosts. And the Tower would be bursting at the seams.”

They both chuckled at the thought, and Hannah, finished with her buttered bread and cheese and her tea, dug her hands under the cuffs of the opposite sleeves and grasped her arms tightly. None of her dreams and plans over the winter had included them laughing together at treasonous absurdities.

He looked purely handsome when he laughed—especially when he was also sleepy.

“And how did the conversation get from the Tower to Ainsley?” he asked.

“He frowned in thought when I mentioned your name,” she said, “and then seemed to remember who you were. A dashed shame, he said, that you could not have been Earl of Merton, though he was inordinately fond of the current earl. And there was something about you he ought to remember. He dug very deep into his memory, Constantine, and then popped up with the name of Ainsley Park without any prompting at all. He looked just as pleased with himself as if he had pulled a plum out of the Christmas pudding. A wonderful man, he declared—you, that is, Constantine—and he fully intends to offer you some assistance in your charitable endeavors and to honor you personally in some suitable way.”

He shook his head.

“Was he inebriated?” he asked.

“Not to the point of making an idiot of himself,” she said. “But he did drink an alarming amount even when I was looking. I daresay he drank just as much if not more when I was not looking.”

“One must hope, then,” he said, “that he will forget—again.”

“He saw a plump and frumpish matron as he finished speaking,” she said, “and his eyes lit up and he went in pursuit of her. I was totally forgotten and abandoned. I might not have existed. It was very lowering, Constantine.”

“The king’s tastes in women were always eccentric,” he said, “to put a kind spin on them. Peculiar, to be a little less kind. Bizarre, to be truthful. Did everyone else ignore your existence?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I am the Duchess of Dunbarton.”

“That is the spirit, Duchess,” he said, and his very dark eyes smiled at her.

It was very disconcerting and very knee-weakening. None of the rest of his face smiled. Yet she did not feel mocked. She felt—teased. Liked. Did he like her?

And did she like him? Like, as opposed to lust after?

“If you had made off with the crown jewels this afternoon and presented them all to Babs,” she said, “instead of merely buying her an ice at Gunter’s, she would not have been half as delighted.”

“She was pleased, was she not?” he said. “Have you met her vicar? Is he worthy of her?”

“Among other lesser virtues,” she said, “he possesses a special smile, which he saves just for her. And it pierces straight through to her heart.”

They gazed at each other across the low table.

“Do you believe in love?” she asked him. “That kind of love, I mean.”

“Yes,” he said. “I would have said no once upon a time. It is easy to be cynical—life gives one much evidence to suggest that there is nothing else to be and remain honest. But I have four cousins—second cousins —who grew up in the country in genteel poverty and burst upon the social scene with the death of Jon. Country bumpkins, no less, whom I expected to be wild and extravagant and vulgar. I hated them even before I set eyes upon them, especially the new Merton. They turned out to be none of those things, and one by one they all made matches that should have been disastrous. And yet all the evidence points to the conclusion that my cousins have converted their marriages into love matches. All of them. It is unmistakable and extraordinary.”

“Even the cousin who married the Duke of Moreland?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “even Vanessa. And yes, I believe in love.”

“But not for yourself?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“Does one have to work at finding and building it?” he asked her. “The experiences of my cousins would seem to suggest that one does. I am not sure I am prepared to put in the effort. How would one know it would not all be in vain? If love arrives in my arms full blown one day, I will be quite happy. But I will not be unhappy if it does not. I am contented with my life as it is.”

And yet it seemed to Hannah that he looked melancholy as he said it. He had, she thought a little wistfully, an enormous amount of love to give to the right woman. A love that would move mountains or universes.

“And you, Duchess,” he said. “You loved when you were a girl and were badly hurt. You loved Dunbarton, but not, I think, in any romantic way. Do you believe in the sort of love Miss Leavensworth has found?”

“When I was nineteen,” she said, “I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep—or not deep—that love would have gone. All things happen for a purpose—or so the duke taught me, and I believe him. Perhaps discovering Colin and Dawn together was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Strange, that. She had never consciously thought it before. What if she had not discovered the truth until too late? What would her life be like now? And what if Colin had never loved Dawn? Would she still love him now? Would she be content with her life with him? There was no way of knowing. But she no longer felt the pain of losing him, she realized. She probably had not for a long time. Only the pain of betrayal and rejection. That had lingered.

“Even without the example of Barbara, though,” she said, “I would know that real love exists. I mean that real, once-in-a-lifetime, soul-deep love that happens to a few people but never to most. The duke knew it and told me about it.”

“Dunbarton flaunted a former love before you?” he asked. “If it was former.”

“He was a year into his mourning when I met and married him,” she said. “The worst should have been over and perhaps was. But he never stopped grieving. Never for a moment. It was a love that had endured for more than fifty years, and it was a love that defined his entire life. It enabled him to love me.”

He folded his arms and gazed steadily at her for a while.

“And yet,” he said, “he never married her. And he kept her such a secret that no whisper of her existence ever seems to have reached the ears of the ton.”

“He was the duke’s secretary,” she said, “and remained so all his adult life. And so they were able to be together and live together without anyone remarking upon the fact. They must have been very discreet, though. Even the servants seemed not to know the truth, or else they were so loyal to the duke that they never spoke of what they knew beyond his household. They were loyal. They still are.”

“Dunbarton told you of such things?” he asked her.

“Before we married,” she said, “when he was making clear to me that he had no ulterior motive in marrying me but to take me away and teach me to be a duchess and a proud, independent beauty in the short time remaining to him. He had not been able to take his eyes off me during the wedding, he told me, not because he felt lasciviously toward me but because I looked so like an angel that I surely could not possibly be human. But angels ought not to have their hearts broken by plodding yokels—his