Bodkin stomped across the room until he was standing right in front of the sofa, glaring down at them. ‘Why does he keep saying you’re a duke?’
‘Because,’ said Gregory calmly, ‘that is what I am. The Duke of Halstead.’
‘You’re not!’
‘I am afraid,’ he said, apologising for his rank for the second time that day, ‘that I am.’ He gave her hand a slight squeeze, as though including her in the apology.
She didn’t return the pressure.
‘I am the Duke of Halstead,’ said Gregory. ‘The owner of Wragley’s. To whom you wrote.’
‘But you can’t be! I mean we—’ Bodkin clenched his fists, which were grazed about the knuckles, just like Gregory’s. As if he’d thought the same thing as her, he glanced down at them.
‘Yes, I do recall the incident,’ said Gregory. ‘Though why you think that precludes me from being the Duke of Halstead, I fail to comprehend.’ He leaned back and crossed one leg over the other.
‘Well, because dukes don’t go visiting mills and getting into fist fights with the foreman, that’s why.’
‘Is that so?’
Gregory drawled the words, looking down his nose at the poor man. Even though Bodkin was standing over them. But then he’d managed to look down his nose at her when she’d been kneeling over him in the lane, hadn’t he? And now she knew how he’d managed it. He’d clearly spent his entire life looking down from a lofty height on the rest of the human race.
‘Bodkin has been keeping us vastly entertained with his tales of how you and he broke into your own factory at dead of night and had to fight your way out,’ said Hugo with glee. ‘Lord, but I’d have given a monkey to have seen it!’
His own factory? Of course it was his own factory. He didn’t work for anyone as any sort of investigator.
He was a duke.
‘You would first have had to be in possession of a monkey,’ said Gregory scathingly.
‘I don’t see why you need to bring monkeys into it,’ Lady Mixby complained. ‘As well as talk of brawling with common persons. No offence, Mr Bodkin. I am sure you are a very worthy person in your way, and I have found your company most refreshing, but for Halstead to declare he means to have a new duchess is far more interesting!’ She waved one dimpled hand in Prudence’s direction. ‘For him to perform such a volte-face will rock society to its very foundations.’
It certainly would if they knew where she’d come from and how they’d met.
‘We were not speaking of real monkeys, Lady Mixby,’ said Gregory witheringly, ‘but a sum of money. Vulgar persons describe it that way.’
‘Halstead, I know I owe you a great deal,’ said Lady Mixby, her face flushing. ‘But I must really protest at anyone using vulgarity in my drawing room.’
‘Bravely said, Aunt,’ he said icily. ‘I beg your pardon, Aunt, Miss Benderby, Miss Carstairs.’
‘Never mind begging everyone’s pardon,’ said Hugo, going to stand behind Lady Mixby’s sofa and placing his hands on its back. ‘We’re all of us dying of curiosity. Oh, and I had to let Lady Mixby in on the nature of our wager once Bodkin turned up, so you don’t need to go into why you went haring off to Manchester under an alias, without your valet or groom.’
Well, that was what he thought. Prudence most definitely wanted to know the exact terms of the wager.
‘No,’ continued Hugo, ‘what we want to know is how you came to acquire a fiancée who looks like a gypsy when everyone knows you’d rather cut off your right arm than ever marry again.’
So that was why Lady Mixby had said society was going to be rocked to its foundations. Well, she’d known about his reluctance to marry again. Because he’d confided in her. But she’d never suspected it was common knowledge. That put a different complexion on things entirely.
Gregory gave him a look that should have frozen the blood in his veins. ‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head,’ he growled.
She supposed she should be grateful that he was trying to defend her but, really, who could blame Hugo for speaking of her this way when it was obvious they’d never have crossed paths if he hadn’t been engaged in trying to win some sort of wager?
At that moment there was a knock at the door and the butler came in with a tea tray.
‘Better bring a decanter of something stronger,’ suggested Hugo as the butler deposited the tray on a table beside Prudence’s sofa. ‘Tea may suffice for this wench, but my poor old cousin looks decidedly in need of something more restorative.’