The voice came from behind her, nearly stalling her breath.
Damnation.
Sucking in a sharp breath, she turned, very, very slowly.
The Duke of Wynford stood at the mouth of the alley, arms loosely at his sides, watching her with an expression that was not quite one of surprise but more the expression of a man who has suspected something and found himself reluctantly proved correct.
In her peripheral vision, Caroline caught Laura’s wide, panicked eyes. She tilted her head, the smallest of gestures:go.
Laura hesitated, and Caroline jerked her chin.
Go. Now.
Laura went, running past the Duke with the practiced invisibility of the truly terrified, disappearing in the direction of the waiting carriage.
Caroline did not watch the coach leave. She kept her gaze on Anthony Keating, the Duke of Wynford, who was looking at her with those green eyes: calm, unreadable, and entirely too perceptive.
She reviewed a swift, silent account of her options.
She could explain, she could try to deflect, or she could simply run.
She took a single step back and made her choice. She turned on her heel and bolted.
She tried to, at least—for his hand closed around her wrist before she had taken two strides.
“Just where do you think you’re going?” the Duke tutted.
The momentum of his grip swung her around, and the hat, already loose, already betraying her, flew from her head entirely. She felt her hair come down across her shoulders in one cool, tumbling rush, and for a single suspended moment, the alley was perfectly, damningly silent.
The lamp at the far end guttered in a passing breeze. Somewhere beyond the tavern wall, a man’s laughter rose and faded.
Caroline became acutely aware, in the manner one notices irrelevant details only when catastrophe is already in motion, that her hair smelled of the rosewater and orris root that Janepressed into every rinse. She cursed herself for not using pins to hold her locks and the hat in place. Slowly, she lifted her chin and met his gaze. The Duke of Wynford, standing less than two feet away, had gone very still.
His hand dropped from her wrist as though he had been burned. His eyes moved from her face to the loose hair over her shoulders and back again, and in them she saw the precise moment that certainty replaced suspicion.
“Lady Caroline.” His voice was different now, much slower. Deeper. “What on earth are you doing here?”
Chapter Two
“What on earth are you doing here?”
He had not moved.
That was the first thing Caroline registered: that the Duke of Wynford was simply standing there in the mouth of the alley, his expression arranged into something impressively unhurried, as though he intercepted women tumbling out of underground boxing matches in stolen breeches every evening of the week.
Which, given his reputation, was perhaps not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
Of course, she knew him, but not very well. She barely knew him at all, in truth: he had appeared at Grayston House a handful of times over the last few years, and on each occasion, they had exchanged no more than a few sentences. Caroline knew from Lewis’s claims that he was her brother’s friend, his closest friendthese past years. She also knew that the Duke was the most notorious rake in London, according to the ton’s whispers.
She had no cause to know him better than that.
Caroline met his gaze now and found that she could say nothing… because there was absolutely nothing she could say.
“Well,” he said.
“Well,” she returned.
She was precisely aware that her hair was still down, splayed over the shoulders of a dead man’s coat. She quickly picked her hat up from the dirty London street and clutched it tightly against her stomach with both hands like a supplicant at chapel.