This had to stop. He needed to put an end to his inappropriate fixation on her. So, he decided to write Cassian a letter, a much-needed one.
Dear Stonevale,
I trust this correspondence reaches you without delay.
I write to you on a matter of some importance. As you know, I have lately assumed responsibilities that do not permit indulgence in delay, and it is now necessary that I turn my attention to securing a suitable match.
You have, on more than one occasion, offered your opinion regarding the sort of woman who might best answer my requirements. I am therefore requesting—formally, and without patience for your usual theatrics—that you makediscreet enquiries among your acquaintances and present me with the names of two or three ladies whose rank and character make them appropriate for serious courtship.
There is no need to cast the net wide. I require sense, steadiness, and an impeccable reputation. Beauty, while preferable, is not a substitute for judgment.
Send your recommendations to me as expeditiously as you can manage. I will, of course, make the final decision myself.
Yours, Frostmore
He sanded the page, folded it, sealed it, and in that small series of movements, there was something almost ritualistic—something he needed more than he cared to admit. An exorcism, performed in ink and wax. He could not undo what he had done to Anastasia, nor could he erase the memory of her standing before him, proud and furious, forcing him to call it what it was. But he could force the world back into its proper shape. He could put a name—two names, three names—between himself and the vixen with green eyes. He could build his walls again.
He told himself that once the letter left Frostmore, she would begin to leave him, too.
Not just from his house.
From his mind.
Anastasia was distracted. The brush moved in her hand, but there was no strategy in it, no intention—only idle streaks dragging across the canvas, as though her mind were elsewhereand her arm had been left behind to continue the work without her. It was not like her at all.
“Heavens! What are you painting, Anastasia?” the dowager duchess exclaimed. “It looks like you have merely splashed some brown over green, like mud on grass.”
Anastasia gasped as she saw the dowager leaning toward her to squint at her work. She then remembered that she was in the old lady’s drawing room, and not some field or forest, daydreaming about a man whom she initially thought hated her.
“Er, it is a study in emotional ambiguity,” Anastasia explained, although she knew that she herself was vague and probably ridiculous. With her mind preoccupied with how handsome Benedict was and how talented his tongue was, her thoughts were utterly shattered.
“Indeed,” the dowager remarked, sounding extremely unconvinced, but too polite to say what she probably thought of her niece.
Anastasia dipped the brush again and tried to force herself to paint something sensible—grass, trees, sky, anything that was not the memory of Benedict’s mouth and his voice and the way he had looked at her when he said that what they had shared was amistake. She had told herself she was furious. Shewasfurious. And yet the memory still made her body tighten with humiliating eagerness, as if her flesh had decided it cared little for pride.
After their argument, he had not even offered a farewell. One day, he had been there—cold and precise and infuriating—and the next, he had simply gone. Frostmore had always been a loud place, but without him it felt… oddly hollow.
The brush circled uselessly on the canvas.
“You are very quiet, dear,” the dowager observed, and now her voice carried the faintest note of concern. “Are you ill?”
“I am quite all right,” Anastasia lied, even as she had to fight the ridiculous urge to press her thighs together, because the memory had arrived again without warning: his mouth between her legs, his control, the exquisite torment of being brought to the edge only to be denied until she said his name.
No, I will not think of that.
“Mm.” The dowager’s brow lifted with deliberate elegance. “Are you perhaps missing the Duke?”
The brush slipped from Anastasia’s fingers as if it had been startled, too. It fell straight onto her satin slippers, leaving a wet streak of green across the peach. She groaned and bent quickly to snatch it up, her cheeks burning hot enough to light the room.
“W-what? Of course not,” she said too quickly. “The Duke is nothing more than a buttoned-up tyrant. He hates me as much as he loves his lists. I am merely tired, I suppose. Perhaps I can even admit that I am bored.”
“Bored?” the dowager repeated, her hand pressed to her chest as if Anastasia had stabbed her. “Goodness. If you are willing to wound me so cruelly, the truth must be much worse.”
“Aunt—” Anastasia sighed through her teeth, scrubbing at the paint on her slipper with the edge of her shawl. “That is not what I meant. I am sorry I am ruining the canvas. I can fix it. I can make it look better.”
The dowager watched her for a long moment, and Anastasia braced herself for an interrogation, for a lecture, for someknowing remark that would make her want to crawl under the sofa. Instead, her aunt’s mouth twitched, and Anastasia realized that the gleam in the dowager’s eye was not concern at all.
It was mischief.
