Nathaniel didn’t enjoy being touched, as a rule. Unaccustomed to it in childhood, he’d never acquired the taste for it. But somehow this particular woman sent a prickling wash of awareness over his skin that made him restless.
“Forgive me if I have misunderstood,” that restlessness finally drove him to say. “But is it not a chaperone’s job to…chaperone?”
“Certainly.”
“That may be difficult to achieve when your charge is out there and you’re in here.”
“I think of myself more as Lucy’s friend. I know her well, you see.” The woman smiled, but it was not a smile designed to warm—rather, it sent an interesting chill down Nathaniel’s spine.
“Lucy doesn’t need someone hovering over her, correcting her posture and her deportment and her mode of speaking. Lucy is naturally graceful and sweet; she cares about others and is thoughtful about the world. But she can be impulsive—and she has a young person’s view of the future. As in, she believes it to be something far off that she need not concern herself with.”
“And that pertains, somehow, to the way you see your role as Lucy’s chaperone?” he guessed, intrigued despite himself.
“I am not here to help Lucy navigate the London social season. That would be absurd; I don’t know anything about it, myself. My upbringing was…” She paused. “Quiet. I’ve spent all my life in the country. I don’t understand the intricate, arcane rules that govern your world. But I do understand people.”
Nathaniel waited, the air between them thickening with a tension he couldn’t pinpoint.
She cocked her head, ever so slightly. “I understand you, I think.”
The way she said it, her words so even and measured and calm, nevertheless contrived to make Nathaniel feel as though she was passing along a warning.
Maybe the warning was in her eyes. There was no fear, no threat, no guile in her look—only deep, warm brown that shimmered with hidden depths as she gazed back at him across the carriage.
Instinctively, Nathaniel responded the way he did in the ring. He sized up his opponent, keeping all his senses alert for any movement that might predict what she would do next. His blood surged, pumping harder through his veins and readying his muscles for whatever he might call on them for.
“What is it you think you understand?” he asked, surprised at the rasp of his own voice.
She leaned forward. “You are thinking that you would love nothing more than to be rid of us. You cannot wait for this entire episode to be over so that you can wash your hands of us and never see us again.”
Perhaps Mrs. Pickford was less perceptive than she thought, if she didn’t realize how little Nathaniel relished the idea of never seeing her again.
He frowned, unsure where that thought had come from.
“Yes, very good.” Mrs. Pickford nodded approvingly. “Try to intimidate me with that thunderous brow.”
Nathaniel scowled harder, caught between the urge to smooth his brow to prove her wrong, and the annoyance of evidently not being sufficiently intimidating.
“Not at all. Perhaps what you are perceiving as intimidation is mere bewilderment. If you have a point, I pray you will come to it soon.”
“The point, Your Grace, is that you are looking at this situation—at your sister—as a mishap to be swept under the carpet and covered up as quick as you can. When in reality, you ought to view this chance meeting as a wonderful opportunity.”
Unbidden, Nathaniel’s mind produced an image of the opportunities he’d like to take with Mrs. Pickford’s delightfully smooth curves and radiant, silky skin. But that likely wasn’t what she meant.
“Enlighten me. How is it wonderful for me to find my half-sister engaged in an extremely public brangle with the most notorious rake in London?”
“Because this is your chance. Your chance to make things right with your family and do as you should have done two years ago when your father died.”
Nathaniel stiffened, with affronted anger and something else, too. Something much more like shame than he was accustomed to feeling. “You dare.”
The witch had the temerity to shrug her slim shoulders. “I suppose I haven’t much to lose by offending you. Though I don’t say this to upset you, Your Grace, only to point out that surely you won’t want to miss this chance to do what is right.”
He ground his back molars for a moment before saying, “And what is right, in your opinion, Mrs. Pickford?”
She blinked slowly, a tiny smile curling her lovely pink mouth. “Why, obviously you will wish to invite the dowager duchess and Lady Lucy to quit their rented lodgings and come stay with you, at Ashbourn House.”
She thought she had him, that there was no polite way to refuse, no decent path to escape the fate she’d laid out so neatly for him.
But Nathaniel had not waited thirty years to become Duke of Ashbourn only to crumple like an over-arranged cravat at the crook of her slender finger.
