But the sound of glass shattering could not be ignored. And when one of the gardeners came running into the house with a decapitated bust under his arm, James didn’t wait for an explanation.
He raced upstairs and took one look at the scene in the drawing room before he went into action. Ivy sat upon the windowsill like a picture in a broken frame. Everything about the moment seemed distorted. She was sickly white, and there was enough blood trickling from her wrist that he might have feared her dead had she not turned her head toward him. Mary had a tight grip on her other hand.
“Ivy,” he said, approaching her as calmly as he could.
“I broke the window,” she said, turning her head away. “Did you know you can tell the age of a house by the depth of its windowsills?”
He rushed forward and gathered her up in his arms. He would deal with her complaints at a later time. He knew the children were watching. Their attention did not deter his instincts in the least.
He bore Ivy through the door to his bedchamber with a humanitarian purpose he convinced himself elevated him above his earlier earthly desires. He might even have believed his good intentions had a sweetly mocking voice not spoken over his shoulder as he laid the slowly reviving governess on his bed: “Ivy?”
A disbelieving silence, then the same voice continued with, “Ivy Fenwick? One of my oldest friends?”
Ivy sat up from the bed as if reanimated. James was so relieved to see her return to her former self that he finally turned to acknowledge the woman who had shadowed him into his suite. He hadn’t been paying attention to her or the children at all. But the rubies around her neck blazed so brilliantly that even if James had managed to disregard her dramatic entrance, he couldn’t ignore her presence entirely, much as he would have liked to.
He took her by the arm. “Elora, I sent you a letter asking you not to come,” he said in a low voice.
“I didn’t receive it,” she said, pulling her arm free. “Why is Ivy Fenwick bleeding in your bed?”
“She’s the governess,” he said, wondering which of his servants had given her Ivy’s name. “And she needs a physician. She’s had an accident, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“How could I fail to notice? There is a trail of blood from the drawing room to your door. Do you like my necklace?”
“Does the Tower of London know the Crown Jewels are missing yet?”
“That would be quite the theft, wouldn’t it?” she asked with a grin.
James did his best to politely pretend she didn’t exist, but when she started to help settle Ivy into the bed, he realized that erasing Elora from the scene was an impossibility. Ivy was the only one who mattered right now. He had bound her wrist with a bed tassel to stop her flow of blood. If he could, he’d lie down next to her to rest his throbbing head.
“I feel better,” Ivy murmured, her head bobbing back against the pillow. “I left the drawing room in a mess. Your Grace, please forgive me. Are the children safe?”
He nodded at her from the foot of the bed. “We rang Carstairs for the physician. Never mind the mess.” Or the mistress, he thought. Talk about bad timing. The situation appeared too suspicious to explain it as anything but the truth.
Elora moved to the other side of the bed. “You don’t remember me, do you? It’s been a long time, and we didn’t part during what one would call an enchanted evening.”
James felt as if he should do something to interrupt the conversation, but what? “Despite what it looks like, this isn’t what either of you are thinking.”
* * *
Elora’s red hair had darkened over the years, but she had retained the slender figure and verve that Ivy had admired during their boarding school years. Unfortunately it appeared that she had also remained true to her penchant for misadventure—and it had brought them together in the duke’s bedroom.
That was a sobering thought.
“What it looks like, James,” Elora said, “is precisely what the servants told me to expect—that the governess cut her hand on a broken window and that you brought her here to await the doctor’s arrival.” She smiled down at Ivy in sympathy. “He did a decent job of bandaging it, but then James is good with his hands. How did it happen? Are you in pain?”
Ivy scooted over to make room for Elora on the bed. “The children misbehaved during a history lesson. It was an accident. Your Grace, I hope that nothing in the garden was damaged. I feel fine now, but I am embarrassed for putting you to all this trouble.”
Elora laughed. “We’ve had our share of troubles, haven’t we? I suppose you know that James and I were on the brink of an arrangement, unless he was hoping to be discreet—in which case I have ruined any chance of that.”