“Wool-gathering?” Sir Thomas Williams laughed with the particular braying quality of a man three glasses past his sober limit. “That’s a new euphemism for it. Which lovely creaturehas captured your wandering attention? Lady Hartwick’s been making eyes at you all evening.”
Tobias’s gaze flickered toward the widow in question. She sat across the room in a gown cut daringly low, her fan employed with theatrical precision as she laughed at something Lord Ashford was saying. Pretty enough, he supposed. Willing, certainly—she’d made that abundantly clear during their encounter at Lady Pembroke’s musicale last week.
And he felt absolutely nothing.
“Lady Hartwick is charming,” he said, shuffling the deck. “Though I suspect Lord Ashford has prior claim to her attention.”
“Since when has that stopped you?” Waverly reached for his brandy. “The Tobias Grant I knew would have viewed prior claims as merely an additional challenge.”
The Tobias Grant you knew died somewhere between Kent and London.
But he merely smiled—that same careless smile he’d perfected over years of performance—and began dealing. “Perhaps I’ve developed something resembling restraint in my old age.”
“Old age?” Daniel Harcourt’s voice cut through the conversation from his position to Tobias’s left. “You’re thirty-one, not ancient.Though I confess you’ve been acting rather like a man attending his own funeral these past months.”
Tobias dealt the final card with more force than intended. “Your imagination runs wild, Daniel.”
“Does it?” His friend studied him with those penetrating eyes that missed far too much. “You’ve attended every fashionable event this Season. Smiled at all the right moments. Laughed at terrible jests. And yet somehow, you’re not actuallyhereat all, are you?”
The observation struck uncomfortably close to the truth. Tobias focused on arranging his cards—a decent hand, though he cared little—rather than meeting Daniel’s knowing gaze.
“I’m sitting directly before you. Where else would I be?”
“That,” Daniel said quietly, “is precisely what I’ve been wondering.”
The game proceeded with desultory conversation. Waverly lost spectacularly and blamed his cards. Pemberton won modestly and crowed as though he’d conquered Napoleon. And Tobias played mechanically, his mind drifting despite every effort to anchor it in the present.
Six months. Half a year since he’d watched Redmond Park disappear into morning mist. Since he’d held Henry and felt the boy’s small arms wrap tight around his neck. Since he’d seenAmelia standing upon those steps with her composure perfect and her eyes devastating.
He’d told himself the distance would help. That time apart would restore proper perspective, would transform this uncomfortable awareness into mere familial concern.
Instead, it had grown worse.
Every letter she sent—brief, perfectly appropriate updates about Henry’s progress—he read until the paper grew soft from handling. The child’s sock remained in his coat pocket, transferred each morning carefully, when he dressed. And at night, alone in his too-large townhouse, he lay awake imagining what she might be doing at that precise moment.
Reading, perhaps. Or singing Henry to sleep. Or sitting alone in the drawing room with that particular expression she wore when she believed no one was watching—the one that suggested she carried weights no one else could see.
“Redmond?”
He looked up to find all three men watching him expectantly.
“Your wager,” Waverly prompted. “Are you in or folding?”
Tobias glanced at his cards as though seeing them for the first time. A strong hand, actually. He should press the advantage.
“I fold.”
Daniel’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “You’re folding on a hand that could clean us all out?”
“I find myself rather tired of cards tonight.” Tobias set down his hand and rose, ignoring their protests. “Gentlemen, I bid you good evening.”
He wove through White’s familiar rooms with increasing desperation for air that didn’t taste of smoke and wasted hours. Past the hazard table where young fools lost their fathers’ fortunes. Past the reading room where old men dozed behind newspapers. Past?—
“Viscount Redmond!”
He turned to find a vision in rose silk bearing down upon him with determined grace. Miss Charlotte Denham, fresh from her second Season and possessed of both considerable beauty and a mother with matrimonial aspirations.
“Miss Denham.” He executed a bow that would have satisfied even Edward’s exacting standards. “How delightful to see you.”
