“Look,” Colehaven whispered, giving a subtle nod toward another foursome on the dance floor. “See the sort of man Felicity chooses?”
Priscilla’s heart stuttered and she stumbled.
The duke caught her. “Are you all right?”
“Splendid,” she croaked.
Priscilla was not all right. She had just glimpsed Thaddeus Middleton.
Her lungs could no longer breathe.
She had not heard his name announced, which meant he had arrived before her.
For two long sets, she had searched for him, and he had been here this whole time. No smile. No word of greeting. Not even a polite nod from across the room.
In fact, she hadn’t seen him at all until this moment, which seemed to imply he’d been otherwise occupied, somewhere out of the public eye.
Perhaps with the woman currently simpering in his arms.
“Are you certain you’re all right?” Colehaven asked again.
Priscilla nodded jerkily. “Capital.”
Besides, what had she expected? She’d told Thaddeus that she was uninterested in marriage; he was a charming bachelor who was interested in marriage…
It was just a matter of time before he found what he was looking for and abandoned his silly epistolary friendship with Priscilla.
As soon as the music drew to a close, she dipped the requisite curtsy to Colehaven and fled the dance floor.
She was finished with ballrooms, finished watching Thaddeus dance with other women. Young, pretty, eligible women. Women that would actually marry him.
With the requisite quadrille out of the way, she could now safely retire to the library for a set or two. No one would notice her absence, and a bit of quiet solitude would allow her to regain her lost equilibrium.
Just by crossing the threshold into the silent, peaceful library, Priscilla felt her pulse slow back to normal. This was what she needed. Something to take her mind off a romance she’d known from the moment she’d seen him at Almack’s that she could not have.
She strode to the bookshelves at the far side of the library. This section was furthest from the soft light of the fire, but the books on these shelves were more interesting. Three entire rows of uncut volumes on travel.
Priscilla would never presume to slice someone else’s pages for reading—tempting though it might be—but must content herself instead with the maddening game of imagining everything she was missing as she leafed through.
As before, there was still only one volume dedicated to equatorial Africa. She’d all but memorized the fifty visible percent of its pages during past escapes to this same nook of the library.
She reached for the volume anyway.
“Bonsoir, Mademoiselle Weatherby,” came a low, familiar voice.
Priscilla spun about, abandoning the travel book.
“Oh,” she stammered. “Er, good evening. I mean, bonsoir.”
Splendid. Incredibly fluent. She was going to take the entire world by storm with her effortless command of riveting French conversation.
“Toutes les soirées que je passe avec vous sont belles.”
Likely, Priscilla should at least attempt to parse this phrase and respond accordingly.
She could not.
The air had been sucked from the room upon his arrival. She had thought this phenomenon an ancillary effect of the stagnant air in her grandmother’s townhouse, but here in the Everetts’ spacious library, Priscilla had been breathing very well until Thaddeus entered the room.
