He had done the exact opposite.
He had stepped forward.
And, damn him, he had taken her with him.
Bea’s pencil hovered.
She closed her eyes for a beat and saw it again: the shift of bodies in the room as Nicholas guided her through, the way conversations had faltered, the way men who had not noticed her at all suddenly had no choice but to.
And then his voice, maddeningly calm, as if he were announcing a change in the weather.
Lady Beatrix has been following the Reform question…
He had said it as though it were natural.As though she belonged in that discussion.As though her mind were not an ornament but a weapon worth unsheathing.
Bea’s throat tightened—an irritating, inexplicable thing—as if she were moved.
She was notmoved.
She was…annoyed.
Because she had not expected to be seen that way.
And she had certainly not expected to be seen that way byNicholas Archer,who was supposed to be a snake, a menace, a smirk in human form.
Yet he had looked at her in that salon with something that had felt dangerously close to respect.
“You were brilliant,” he had said afterward.
Notyou were pretty.Notyou were spirited.Notyou were entertaining.
You were brilliant.
Bea’s fingers curled around the pencil.He didn’t agree with her of course.He was as loyal a Tory as the rest of them.But he hadn’t tried to silence her.He’d listened to her thoughts.And he’d complimented her.
She was not accustomed to compliments.They made her feel as though she’d been handed something she didn’t know she’d been missing.
She bent over the page again and began shading Langford’s cheeks with vigorous displeasure.
Harder.Darker.More ridiculous.
That ought to fix it.
It did not.
Her mind kept slipping back to Hillary House like a toe finding the same worn path inside a slipper.
Nicholas’s quiet interjection.His cool dismantling of Langford’s pompous certainty.The way he’d said, with vexatious ease, that if a man’s argument could not survive being questioned, perhaps it deserved to be replaced.
Bea had nearly choked on the urge to grin.
And then—worse—she had felt a flicker of something warm inside her chest.
Something that was not anger.Something that was not triumph.Something dangerously like…gratitude.
Bea drew Langford’s ears larger.Enormous, in fact.The better to hear the “lower orders” he so feared.
There.
