He doesn’t want to be here, she realized, her heart sinking like a river stone. Why did he bring me if it was going to make him miserable?
There was no one else in the garden, the party being well underway. Raucous music filtered out from the open balcony doors, nothing like the sedate Mayfair orchestra Bess had become accustomed to. Laughter rang through the air over a babble of voices and the stomp of dancing feet.
“If you didn’t wish to come, you shouldn’t have invited me.” Bess let go of his arm. All her bubbly anticipation of the evening had popped, sitting in her stomach like lead.
He frowned down at her. “You want to dance. We’re going to dance.”
Bess frowned back. “It’s no good if you’re forcing yourself through the motions,” she argued. “If you’re unhappy?—”
“I’m used to unhappiness,” he said, with a wry twist to his lips. “It’s my natural state. Less so when you’re near.”
“No one’s natural state is misery,” Bess said reflexively. “But it doesn’t follow, I suppose, that it’s always easy to be happy. It takes some doing, I find.”
His lips quirked, that secret half smile she’d never seen him give anyone else. “Perhaps. I never learned the way of it.”
“Maybe I could teach you,” Bess offered, catching his hand and feeling the immediate curl of his strong fingers around hers.
“How long do you have? It would likely take years of study.”
Sorrow shafted through her, but Bess kept smiling up at him. “We have tonight.”
A silent moment passed between them, heavy with something Bess didn’t want to examine. Another burst of uproarious laughter rolled out of the party up ahead, and Nathaniel’s expression turned serious beneath the mask.
“When we get inside, stay close to me.”
Bess swayed toward him, not precisely swooning…but not not swooning, either. “Where else would I wish to be?”
“I am not jesting. This place is not…respectable.”
“Less respectable than The Nemesis?” Bess laughed, but he didn’t crack.
“Much less,” he told her. “The Nemesis may be…unconventional, but with Madame Leda in charge, it’s practically a convent compared to Wycombe House.”
“Why? Who’s in charge here?”
“No one.” Nathaniel turned to survey the mansion neutrally. “It’s been given over to chaos.”
She had a sudden, startling sense of how much he must want to be with her, if he’d brought her here to this place he’d never ordinarily go.
“But someone must own the place,” Bess said, uncertain, glancing about the tangle of plant life choking the old stone garden path and the places where the wall surrounding the property had begun to chip and split.
“A very bad man. The Duke of Thornecliff. This was his family’s London home for generations, but he abandoned responsibility for the property years ago. It sits empty all but one night a year, when its doors are thrown open to revelers in masks and outlandish costumes.”
“Why?” Bess thought she probably sounded hopelessly unsophisticated, but she couldn’t conceive of a reason for the waste of a house like this.
Nathaniel shrugged his broad shoulders, contempt written across his face as clear as daylight. “Perhaps he wishes to desecrate his family home. He certainly has done his best to tarnish any possible legacy his name could carry.”
An unwelcome bolt of empathy for Thornecliff shot through Bess. Maybe the man was simply a villain, and there was no more to the story than that.
But Bess had found that, like misery, villainy was not anyone’s natural state of being. “His family must have been very cruel to him.”
The corners of Nathaniel’s mouth turned down in bemusement. “What would that matter?”
Chapter Nineteen
What would it matter if your family was cruel to you?
How to answer that question on the lips of a man whose parents had both left him, in different ways, before he was old enough to understand anything but that he was alone. And yet, that man still cared more for his family name than for his own happiness.
