The door slammed behind him.
Tristan had no recollection of ordering his carriage to Pembroke Manor. One moment, he was pacing Henry’s library, the next, he was standing before the empty fireplace of the drawing room, resisting the urge to fidget.
Then footsteps reached him and he straightened, taking a moment to breathe before turning around. Lavinia entered, but paused abruptly when she registered him. Her dark hair was pinned more severely than usual, but a few strands had escaped and were now framing her face. The effect was not one of disarray, but of defiance—a refusal to be perfectly tamed.
She dipped a curtsy, not too deep, and straightened. “Your Grace.”
“Lady Lavinia.” He inclined his head, but the words, which had arranged themselves neatly in his mind during the ride, scattered at her entrance.
A moment passed. The hush between them was not silence, but a thrum.
“Forgive the intrusion,” he said, surprised by the roughness of his own voice. “I was passing through and thought—” He stopped. He could not say what he thought. He did not know.
She smiled, polite but wary. “I hope your business in town was satisfactory.”
“Yes. Quite.” He cleared his throat. “How is Sophia?”
Her expression softened, and she gestured for him to sit. “She is well. She completed her landscape study this morning. I suspect she will begin pestering the stonemason for marble before long.”
He allowed himself a small smile and sat at her suggestion. She took the facing chair, hands folded in her lap.
“She has a talent for watercolor,” Lavinia said. “But she is afraid of it. She prefers to hide behind technique.”
“She is her father’s daughter,” Tristan said. “We are raised to think of creativity as a luxury. In my family, it was regarded as a defect.”
Lavinia’s eyebrows lifted. “How unutterably dull.”
He could not help it; he laughed. It startled him. He realized, with a small shock, that it was the first time he had genuinely laughed since?—
He banished the thought.
“I hope you do not think me neglectful,” he said. “I have no gift for managing Sophia’s... development.”
“I do not think you neglectful,” Lavinia replied, and it sounded almost like kindness. “But perhaps a little too concerned with the outcome.”
“Is that a failing?”
“In this case? No,” she said, “but sometimes the outcome is less interesting than the attempt.”
He looked at her then, really looked. The line of her jaw, the determined set of her mouth. And he remembered, with vivid clarity, the moment in the garden when he had caught her, blindfolded, and felt the shock of contact run through both of them. The memory was so immediate that it stole his breath. Heremembered her gasp, the heat of her skin, the way his hands had not wanted to let go.
But it was the scent—something floral, not quite rose—that pulled him further back, to another night, another room. The masquerade. The mysterious woman in the amethyst pendant, the one who had seemed to know him by touch alone. For an instant, the memories overlaid, and it was as if the masked woman and Lady Lavinia were?—
He jerked his head as if stung.
She noticed. “Are you well, Your Grace?”
He struggled for composure. “A twinge. Old injury. Nothing to concern you.”
She studied him as if his expression would give her an answer, then nodded.
“I’m afraid I must apologize,” he said, scrambling for the rails of the conversation. “I have interrupted your day.”
“You have,” Lavinia replied, “but only as much as any other emergency at this address. Today, it was a burst pipe.”
He arched a brow. “You manage the estate yourself?”
She lifted her chin. “Who else is there to manage it?”
