“I suppose I will. As soon as I forget how to breathe.”
“Then I can just expect you to go about moping for the rest of eternity.”
With a glare, Lucien kicked Faust into a gallop. “I’m not moping. I’m waiting. I told her it was her turn to give ground. She’s a sensible female; she’ll realize that I’m right, and that she’s a fool to give me up to those hordes of lovely ladies who’d be so happy to marry me.”
“And if she doesn’t realize it?”
Robert might have been his own conscience; Lucien had been having the same conversation with himself since she’d stomped out of Balfour House a week ago. “She will.”
“Well, taking turns giving ground and waiting for her to come back all sounds like a pile of nonsense to me.” Robert retorted. “I think it you who’s going to have to realize that.”
“Perhaps.”
As Lucien went about his meetings and dinners and social gatherings, though, he couldn’t help puzzling over what he’d done wrong. Yes, he’d locked her away to keep from losing her, and he should never have let her out. And yes, he’d tricked her into a meeting with a relative she despised. But she’d helped him see the chains and walls he’d put around himself, and she’d practically forced him into reconciling with Rose. Why, then, had it worked on him and not on her?
The answer, or what he hoped was the right answer, finally came to him while he and Rose were discussing her dowry, along with the stipend he meant to settle on her so she would always have her own income, apart from Robert and apart from him.
“Lucien, that’s too much,” his cousin protested, blushing prettily. “You’ve given me far more than I’d hoped for already.”
He ignored Mr. Mullins’s agreeing nod and continued scratching out figures on the draft of the agreement. “Don’t argue. I’m feeling generous.”
Rose giggled. “I don’t think Mama would agree.”
“As long as she holds to her vow never to speak to me again, she can disagree all she likes. It’s not for her, anyway. It’s for you.”
“Thank you.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
Lucien sat still for a moment. He’d enjoyed the morning spent with his cousin; she was pleasant, even if she didn’t present much of a challenge to his intellect. And she’d smiled and laughed and kissed him on the cheek.
Two months ago he would never have tolerated it; two months ago he couldn’t stand being in the same room with either of the Delacroix females. Rose had changed, obviously. She’d become more confident and less self-centered; a pale imitation of her tutor, but a definite improvement over the girl who’d first come to London swathed in pink taffeta.
And he’d changed, too-more than he’d realized. That was the problem, and the solution.Hehad changed. Alexandra hadn’t. She still thought of herself in the same terms that she had for the past five years: that she had to stand alone against everything and everyone who threatened to take away her independence, and that the ground could fall from beneath her feet again at any moment if she dared to relax her guard.
Lucien stood. He needed to open her eyes, as she’d opened his. Not to love, because he knew, he sensed, that she loved him—but to herself.
“Cousin Lucien?” Rose asked, looking up at him with a concerned frown.
“Make the arrangements, Mr. Mullins,” he said. “And when you’ve finished, see me in my office. We have one more matter to take care of.”
Alexandra sat on the edge of her desk and looked into the fresh, naive faces of her students. She’d been one of them herself not so long ago, though there were times, like this afternoon, when she couldn’t remember ever being so young.
“Well,” she mused, “when someone expresses a view about a work of fiction, the commentary is generally thought to be that person’s opinion.”
“But that’s what I said, Miss Gallant,” Alison, one of the rosy-cheeked young ladies, protested. “‘In my opinion, Juliet should have listened to her parents.’”
“Miss Gallant is saying that you’re being redundant, Alison,” another of the girls piped up.
“You be quiet, Penelope Walters,” Alison retorted.
Stifling an exasperated sigh, and grateful Emma had only given her a dozen of the young ladies to begin with, Alexandra stepped forward to restore order. “Now, now. Romeo and Juliet experienced enough bloodshed. We don’t need to add to it.”
The classroom door burst open and Jane Hantfeld, one of the Academy’s older students, hurried past the desks to the windows at the far end of the room. Her face flushed with excitement, she barely spared the other girls a glance. “Oh, my goodness, look! You have to see this!”
“Miss Hantfeld,” Alexandra chastised, too late to stop the stampede to the windows, “class is in session here.”
“Who is he?” Alison asked, giggling. “He’s so handsome.”
“I like his horse,” one of the younger girls chimed in.
