Lucy squinted her eyes and turned to face him. “I don’t think you have ever properly introduced yourself to me. Have you forgotten the manners you were taught, or are you simply not a gentleman at all?”
Brook blinked, caught off guard for the briefest moment, then straightened his back, chin high. “I am a gentleman,” he said. “I simply do not always see the point in using them.”
Lucy’s lips twitched. “Not see the point?” she asked with raised eyebrows. “That is a very ungentlemanly thing to say.”
Brook’s mouth tightened. He made a small, dismissive sound in his throat, spun on his heel, and marched out of the room with an exaggerated huff, the door closing rather harder than necessary behind him.
“You must be careful with him,” Anthony said at once, lowering his voice. “Brook is… difficult.”
Lucy turned to him, curiosity brightening her expression. “Difficult or merely bored?”
Anthony gave a rueful half-smile. “Both. He has driven away more tutors than I care to count. Some lasted weeks. Others scarcely days. He delights in pranks, and he has an unsettling talent for discovering precisely what unsettles people most.”
“That explains the defiance,” Lucy said thoughtfully. “It is easier to misbehave than to admit one is uninterested.”
Anthony studied her. “You are not offended?”
“Hardly,” she replied. “Boys like him test boundaries because no one has yet given them a reason not to.”
He shook his head. “I warn you only because he does not take kindly to correction.”
Lucy smiled, untroubled. “Then I shall not correct him, dear Anthony,” she said lightly. “I shall make friends with him.”
Anthony laughed under his breath as he turned back to continue his studying. “God help you then.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’m sorry, Your Grace,” Lucy said slowly, quite certain she had misheard him. “You want me to what?”
Rowan did not rise from behind his desk. He merely exhaled, long and resigned, as though the very act of asking had cost him something. Sunlight fell across the papers before him, illuminating a desk arranged with military precision, an order that did nothing to soften the faintly beleaguered look in his eyes.
“Coach me,” he said. “In the social sense. I am told the word teach suggests optimism.”
Lucy stared at him. Then she laughed once, sharply, before she could stop herself.
“You have spent weeks informing me, at length, that society is tedious, balls are theatrical nonsense, and that no amount of instruction could make you palatable to a room full ofstrangers,” she said. “You dismissed the entire enterprise of improving your prospects as.... what was the phrase you used?” She paused to think. “Ah, ‘a polite form of humiliation’ if I recall correctly.”
“I remain fond of that assessment,” Rowan replied. “Unfortunately, events have conspired against me.”
Lucy folded her arms, skepticism written plainly across her face. “Then pray, enlighten me. What has changed?”
He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “You.”
She blinked, momentarily caught off guard by the suddenness of his eyes on her. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace?”
“You arrived,” he continued, unhelpfully calm. “You arrived, Miss Crampton, and suddenly my household contains a matchmaker. A professional one. Which means that, quite without my consent, the ton has concluded that I am trying.”
Lucy winced. “I did not announce anything.”
“You existed,” Rowan said dryly. “That was quite sufficient. Now every well-meaning acquaintance believes I am on the brink of matrimony and merely require encouragement, preferably in a ballroom under chandeliers while being examined like a horse.”
Despite herself, Lucy smiled.
“So,” he went on, “I am being invited. Pressed. Cornered. Lady Harrington has informed me that my absence from her ball would be ‘remarkable,’ which I understand to be a threat.”
“So you wish to attend,” Lucy said, “in order to appear cooperative.”
“I wish to attend...” Rowan corrected, raising a finger, “without becoming the evening’s cautionary tale.”
