Of all the omens, he thought.
He did the one thing that felt both reckless and right. He reached for her hand and threaded his fingers through hers, offering not demand but anchorage.
She did not pull away. She leaned in.
Beyond the glass, the ball surged on. In the green hush, a simpler, far more dangerous game began—one that had nothing to do with names or wagers, and everything to do with what they had already chosen.
Chapter 2
William stood before the oval mirror in his dressing room, razor in hand, his face absurdly striped with lather. The other half—jaw, chin, upper lip—remained shadowed and unfinished, an affront to both symmetry and dignity. He stared at his reflection, wondering if he had gone mad overnight. His valet, Fellows, held the towel with saintly patience. After a prolonged silence, William wiped the blade clean and set it down.
“That will do,” he said.
The valet offered the towel, and William took it, smearing the lather with enough force that it spattered his dressing gown. He neither apologized nor corrected the stain. A barely visible twitch of the valet’s eyebrow served as a silent commentary on the proceedings.
Powis House lay silent at this hour, its wide corridors echoing. William strode to his study, the one room allowed to deviate from the decorum of the rest. Books lined the shelves, every title chosen for its utility in distraction, and ledgers and correspondence fanned across the desk. Here, amid the detritus of responsibility, he usually felt most himself.
But not today.
The ledger awaited his attention, columns of figures precisely inscribed, all the details of the dukedom rendered into rows and sums. William took up his pen, intending to lose himself in arithmetic, but his hand refused to cooperate. Instead, it drummed an irregular rhythm along the edge of the desk, reminiscent of the waltz from last night. He pressed his palm flat, willing it to stillness.
With infuriating clarity, he recalled the sensation of her hand in his warm, gloved, resistant at first and then yielding with a flicker of pressure that was neither trust nor surrender. His pulse miscounted. The fox mask had left a faint indentation on her temple, an oval of pale skin that seemed, in memory, indecently intimate. Her scent, crisp and citrusy, still clung to his coat, a taunt and a reminder.
He reached for the quill, and knocked over the inkwell. Black spread across the ledger, obliterating a fortnight of perfectly balanced accounts. William stared at the stain as it expanded. For the first time in his life, it felt fitting.
He stood, chair scraping against the rug, and crossed to the window. Powis House backed onto a private garden, a pocket of wilderness resisting every effort at cultivation. He watched the gardeners, small and purposeful in their green livery, waging their endless war against the bramble and hawthorn. It was a metaphor he would have dismissed under normal circumstances, but today it felt uncomfortably apt.
He heard a subtle cough before he saw the butler, a man who moved with the certainty of a chess piece. “Your tea, Your Grace,” the butler intoned, setting the tray precisely at the edge of the chaos. The cup was bone china, thin enough to reveal the blue veins of William’s hand as he gripped it. The tea was over-steeped and cold.
He drank it anyway, savoring the bitterness.
William wondered if this was how it felt to unravel, not in some grand fit of madness, but in small concessions to disorder. A stained sleeve, a blotted ledger, a teacup ignored until its contents turned to sludge. He considered writing to the doctors at Bedlam, proposing a case study.
But the true source of his distraction, the fixed point around which every errant thought orbited, was Lady Helena Fairfax. He repeated her name aloud, once, as if the syllables might dissipate her presence. They did not. If anything, they thickened the air.
She was, in every sense, his equal. Intelligent, immune to charm, and utterly indifferent to his opinion. Last night’s encounter had been nothing more than the collision of two planets, bound to leave craters. Yet he could not shake the memory of her laughter, the sting of her repartee, the way she had looked at him when the masks came off. It had been as though she’d known all along and simply wanted to see how far he would go.
William paced the length of the study, ignoring the mounting debris of his morning. He was not, by nature, a man given to romance or passion. He preferred his vices predictable, his pleasures private, his affections measured. But Helena inspired in him a chaos that felt like exhilaration.
He stopped before the fireplace, its grate cold and empty, and stared at the painting that dominated the mantle. Edmund, his late cousin, regarded him with a blend of hauteur and mischief that had been the man’s calling card in life. The artist had captured the precise cant of Edmund’s head, the curve of the smile that bordered on insolence.
William studied the portrait, wondering if his own face would one day be immortalized with such accuracy. He doubted it. His father’s portrait hung in the main hall, eyes fixed above the heads of all living creatures, a study in remoteness, the Atteberry legacy in oil and canvas. He imagined his would be much the same.
He addressed the painted Edmund, as he often did when the family's gaze felt heaviest. “You could not have made this easier, could you?” he muttered. “Not even in death.”
The silence provided no answer.
He knew what was expected of him. He was to keep the name unsullied, to guard Helena’s reputation, and keep his distance. He had done so for two years with a discipline bordering on asceticism. Now, with one waltz and a stolen kiss, he had risked it all on a whim.
The urge to laugh rose up, and he let out a single dry bark that startled even him.
He returned to his desk, abandoning the ruined ledger, and reached instead for a sheet of unblemished stationery. The note he composed was brief and precise. A polite request for Lady Fairfax’s company at her convenience—an invitation rather than a summons. He signed it, sealed it with the Atteberry crest, and rang for the butler.
“See that this is delivered with discretion,” he said.
The butler took the note without a blink. “Of course, Your Grace.”
As the door closed, William looked again at the state of his study. The spilled ink, the stained sleeve, the half-shaven face reflected in the darkened window, and felt, for the first time since childhood, a thrill of anticipation.
