“That’s the part of the tale that must keep for another day.” Quinn rose and extended a hand to his wife. “Constance leaves the room if I so much as hint that I’d like to discuss her past.”

“She figured out early how to manage you.” Jane slipped her hand through Quinn’s arm and by subtle changes of posture and expression, became the gracious duchess beaming at a prospective addition to the family.

God above, where would he be without her?

“You are the only woman who knows how to manage me,” Quinn said, as Althea and Nathaniel drew closer, “and that will ever and always be true.”

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Robert found that indulging Lady Constance Wentworth’s urge to do some sketching was oddly restful. Her sitting room was small, which soothed a few of his sundry anxieties, and she herself was a distraction from those same worries.

He did not know if the locking mechanism on the door worked from both sides, for example. Had no idea if the windows were locked or merely fastened. Did the adjoining bedroom have its own door to the corridor? How, precisely, was her balcony situated?

To investigate those factors—they were not details—would have been the behavior of an eccentric. Her sitting room was carpeted—always a fine thing, when a man might fall to the floor insensate at any moment—and her sofa plush and comfortable.

Her lips were plush too. They were an extravagance in an otherwise spare and serious countenance, though she pressed her mouth into a line as she concentrated on her drawing. Behind a practiced, blue-eyed guilelessness, her gaze was still wary. She’d done her hair in a simple chignon worthy of a chambermaid, and she wore a plain blue afternoon dress, only a touch of lace at the collar and a dash of white embroidery at the cuffs.

Lady Constance was trying very hard to appear unremarkable, a wren among the Wentworth peacocks, and yet in the intensity of her focus, in her quiet, in her studied plainness, she begged for further study.

“What happened to you?” Robert asked.

She spared him not even a glance. “I went home, as you apparently did, eventually.”

“You left home of your own volition, while I did not. Did your family receive you decently?”

He’d worried for her, for years he’d worried whether the soft-spoken, blue-eyed maid had found safety. She’d shown courage, ingenuity, and kindness in a place those virtues had all but deserted. When she’d left, he had not dared reply to her letter for fear his epistle would get her in trouble.

Then too, slipping another letter past Dr. Soames’s watchfulness would have been tempting fate.

“Chin up half an inch, Your Grace. My family was excessively understanding.” She made the word understanding into something burdensome, a quality that induced both guilt and resentment.