Settling his feet on the floor, he leaned over the table and held out his hand.
Renwick Bellamont, Duke of Dunmere, likely didn’t understand what this meant to her, how much trust she was placing in him. Was it the same trust he’d shown in introducing her to his son?
He squinted as he read the letter, fine lines radiating from the corners of his mismatched eyes.
Your task, Georgiana, is this: bring about a marriage where none seemed likely to bloom. Use your discernment well. You may find that hearts are not accounts to be balanced, and people are not pieces upon a board.
When he finished, he slid the sheet into the envelope and placed it gently beside her teacup. “Despite your reading material this morn, it seems your father did not consider you a romantic.”
“I think a happy union is possible,” she rushed to say, the need to have him see her differently pricking at her. Her father never got over the belief that his troubled relationship with her mother had damagedhis children’s faith in the institution. “As you certainly know from yours.”
Dunmere’s gaze locked on hers, stark loneliness flaring in his eyes one moment and gone the next. “I fear I can’t vouch for blissful unions, Lady Georgiana. Except for Henry, there was nothing remotely joyful in mine.”
The loaded silence, broken only by an ember cracking in the hearth, settled like a blanket over them. He’d not shared this confidence about his marriage with many, she thought.
But he had withher.
Georgiana brought her teacup to her lips to hide her smile. “Call me George, please. Everyone in my family does. I barely know what to do when I’m called a lady.”
He cradled his cup in his broad hands, his gaze narrowing in thought. Sunlight poured through the windowpanes when he shifted, washing over him, and again, she marveled at his attractiveness. His jaw was darkened with a day’s beard, his long frame sprawled across his host’s settee, all loose-limbed strength and disordered elegance. And those eyes, almost beyond description. Blue, blue,blue. Though he’d slept in his fine clothing, he was unjustly beautiful.
“You don’t look like a George,” he finally said, telling her without actually telling her he’d been thinking about it.
“Ah,” she whispered in a teasing tone that gave him away.
His gaze snagged on her lips as they curved over the rim of her cup. Through the stormy beat of her heart, she watched him retreat. “Henry was the one who didn’t think it, that is. He heard someone call you George. It wasn’t me.”
She laughed, and after a brief, bright moment, he joined in. She loved that unlike other men, he didn’t grow angry when she saw what he kept so sternly under wraps. “If Henry were to come up with a new nickname, what would it be?”
“Gia,” Dunmere said too quickly to be anything but something already on his mind.
Gia.
Gia was courageous. She loved her shapely body and her daringmind. Society’s cuts didn’t wound her. She was a woman who grasped what she wanted and didn’t apologize for the wanting.
Gia would have leaned across the table and pressed her lips to a duke’s.
Only, Georgiana stopped her.
“I have to see this matchmaking assignment through to receive my inheritance.” She traced the rim of her teacup with her finger, gazing at him through her lashes. “I don’t suppose you have any need of a wife?”
He shook his head. “Never again will I have need of one.”
The frank statement hit her in a place it shouldn’t, near her heart, when it ought to have meant nothing at all.
Dunmere leaned in, his voice lowering. “I know a couple who require only a nudge to wed. If you arrange the meeting, it counts, does it not?”
Her fingers stilled against the porcelain. “Is that cheating?”
“One might call it efficiency.” A flicker of something—dry delight, perhaps—touched his mouth. “You don’t strike me as a woman who’d scruple over a harmless deception.”
A soft knock sounded at the open door before Georgiana could decide whether this was insult or praise. A slender woman in a plain cap poked her head around the frame. “Master Henry is ready to go to breakfast, Your Grace.”
“Go to your son, Your Grace,” Georgiana murmured, knowing this interlude had to end.
Something shifted in Dunmere’s expression, pleasure softening into an unexpected tenderness. He rose and, halfway to the door, glanced over his shoulder. “Vale’s gardens at eleven, by the fountain. And Gia…” His eyes glistened in the sconce’s amber glow, the lighter one the exact shade of a kingfisher’s wing. “I prefer Ren to Your Grace. Or Renwick, if you must. Like you, I hardly know what to do with pointless titles.”
And then he was gone—Ren—leaving her thoughts in a restless state fit neither for tea nor matchmaking.
