Hazel’s lips twitched. “Be honest. Does it not unsettle you at least a little… how he sees you?”
Evelyn turned back to them with a carefully schooled expression. “I don’t concern myself with how he sees me. This marriage isn’t about feelings or… or chemistry. It’s a convenience. An arrangement.”
Cordelia tilted her head, unconvinced. “You’re avoiding the question.”
“I’m not avoiding anything.”
“You do flush when he’s near,” Hazel remarked gently.
“I do not.”
“You do,” Cordelia echoed cheerfully. “And it’s very charming.”
“I also flush when I’m angry. Or too warm,” Evelyn countered, crossing her arms.
“Is that what it was when he leaned close to whisper in your ear?” Cordelia asked with faux innocence. “A bout of sudden heatstroke?”
Evelyn threw a pillow at her.
Cordelia caught it mid-air and laughed as Hazel shook her head fondly.
“I cannot pretend,” Evelyn admitted at last, her voice quieter now, “that I’m entirely unaffected.”
She hated saying it aloud. The fact that his gaze lingered longer than it should and that she felt it like a brand on her skin. That when he teased her, which was a rare but devastating occasion,it left her completely disarmed. That he seemed to lookthroughher, not justather.
It was maddening. Unfair. Most of all, dangerous.
“But it doesn’t matter,” she said, more firmly now, “because this isn’t a real marriage, and I intend to keep it that way.”
Hazel nodded slowly. “Even if it starts to feel real?”
Evelyn gave a tight smile. “Then I’ll remind myself that it’s not. That I chose this. That I need the distance more than the dream.”
The room fell quiet again, but it wasn’t heavy now. It was full of understanding. It was the kind of silence shared only by those who had seen her heart cracked open and loved her anyway.
Cordelia walked over and squeezed her hand. “Well, if nothing else, at least he’s very nice to look at.”
Evelyn rolled her eyes. “You’re both incorrigible.”
But her fingers cured faintly around Cordelia’s.
And she didn’t deny it.
Chapter Thirteen
The house was silent, wrapped in the kind of silence that pressed down over the skin like velvet, soft but suffocating.
Evelyn stirred awake, her eyes blinking into the moonlit shadows that crept along her chamber walls. A knock on the door came again. She sat upright, heart lurching.
The Duke.
The thought surged unbidden, absurd and impossible, and yet?—
She was out of bed before she could reason with herself, smoothing down her nightdress and tousling her hair just enough to feign a sleep-disheveled grace. Her bare feet padded across the cold floor as she reached the door and hesitated for half a breath before unlatching it.
She opened it.
And every breath in her lungs turned to ice, because it wasn’t the Duke standing there. It was Lord Ashworth.
