For the first time in his life, Richard almost hit a woman. “Fleur,” he said warningly.

With a disrespectful purse of her lips, Fleur made a curtsy. “Lady Kenworthy.”

“Please,” Iris said, her eyes flicking nervously to Richard before settling back on Fleur. “I hope you will call me Iris.”

Fleur gave her a withering stare, then turned to Richard. “It isn’t going to work.”

“Don’t do this here, Fleur,” he warned her.

She jerked her arm out toward Iris. “Look at her!”

Iris took a little step back. Richard had a feeling she did not even realize she’d done it. Their eyes met, hers bewildered, his exhausted, and he silently pleaded with her not to ask, not yet.

But Fleur wasn’t done. “I’ve already said—”

Richard grabbed her by the arm and hauled her away from the others. “This is not the time or the place.”

She stared at him mutinously, then yanked her arm free. “I’ll be in my room, then,” she said, and stalked off toward the house. But she stumbled on the bottom step and would have fallen if Iris had not leapt forward to catch her.

For a moment the two women remained frozen as if in a tableau. Iris kept her hand on Fleur’s elbow, almost as if she realized that the younger woman was unsteady, that she’d been unsteady for weeks and needed some sort of human contact.

“Thank you,” Fleur said grudgingly.

Iris took a step back, her hands returning to their tightly clasped position in front of her. “It was nothing.”

“Fleur,” Richard said in a commanding voice. It was not a tone he’d often used with his sisters. Perhaps he should have done.

Slowly, she turned.

“Iris is my wife,” he stated. “Maycliffe is her home now, as much as it is ours.”

Fleur’s eyes met his. “I could never overlook her presence here. I assure you.”

And then Richard did the strangest thing. He reached out and took Iris’s hand. Not to kiss it, not to lead her somewhere.

Just to hold it. To feel her warmth.

He felt her fingers lace through his, and he tightened his grip. He did not deserve her. He knew it. Fleur knew it, too. But for this one awful moment, with his entire life crashing around him, he was going to hold his wife’s hand and pretend she would never let go.

Chapter Eighteen

FOR MUCH OF her life, Iris had made a conscious choice to keep her mouth shut. It wasn’t that she had nothing to say; put her in a roomful of cousins and she’d run on at the mouth all night. Her father had once said she was a born strategist, always looking two steps ahead, and maybe this was why she had always recognized the value of choosing when to speak. Never, however, had she been truly rendered speechless. Truly, flabbergastedly, she-could-not-even-think-in-complete-sentences, speechless.