She had not intended to say it aloud—it was the kind of admission that, once out, had its own momentum—but it was true, and she was tired of managing what was true.
“In my novels, the heroes are—there is a quality to them. An earnestness underneath whatever difficult exterior they present. They are wounded but sincere. Guarded but ultimately readable.” She paused. “The Duke of Blackmoor is none of those things.”
“What is he?” Beatrice asked.
Cecily considered the question with more honesty than was strictly comfortable.
“Confident,” she replied. “Not the false kind, not a performance. But genuine confidence, the kind that doesn’t require anyone’s confirmation, which is somehow more unsettling than arrogance would be, because you cannot puncture it.”
She turned the bracelet on her wrist—a nervous habit she had never managed to break.
“He is sharp. Quicker than he lets on, I think, and more deliberate. Everything he says has been considered before he says it, even the things that sound effortless.” She took a deep breath. “And he is far too aware of his own charm, which is perhaps the most irritating thing about him, because the charm is genuine, and it works, and I suspect he knows exactly how well it works at every given moment.”
Beatrice was quiet for a beat. And then, with the precise timing of someone who had been waiting for the right moment, she laughed. It was a warm sound, unguarded and genuine, and it broke the careful tension in the room like a window opening.
“Cecily,” she said, when she had regained her composure, “do you hear yourself?”
“I am being honest.”
“You are being remarkably detailed for a woman who claims not to have an impression.”
Cecily opened her mouth. Closed it. “I am simply observing what is there to observe.”
“Of course you are.” Beatrice’s expression was still warm, still amused, but underneath it was something more considered. “For what it is worth, reputations do not always reflect reality. You know that.” She paused. “Writing for theGazetteas Miss Verity, I watched stories take shape in ink that had nothing to do with the truth of the people they described. A man does something once, in a bad season, and the papers decide the shape of him, and that shape follows him into every room for the rest of his life, regardless of who he actually is.” She met Cecily’s eyes. “Ink can make a villain out of any man.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
Margaret looked up from the dress. “The ton called me mad,” she said, in the mild, untroubled tone of someone who had made their peace with it. “Because I was odd about things and was not particularly careful about concealing them, which I gather is considered eccentric in a woman.” She folded her hands in her lap. “People tend to judge what they do not understand and assign the simplest available label to it. Perhaps the Duke of Blackmoor has simply been labelled.”
Cecily looked at her cousin. At her sister. At the dress on the bed and the ribbon worked neatly through the neckline and the whole quiet domestic scene of it, which looked from the outsideexactly like three women cheerfully preparing for a wedding, and which was from the inside considerably more complicated.
She thought of the drawing room. Of his voice saying,So am I,without decoration or calculation, the way she had heard the truth in it before she had decided to. Of his hands, steady and unhurried. Of his eyes, which were—she had been trying not to think of his eyes and was doing a very poor job at it—very direct and had not once looked away from her face when she was speaking, not even when she was saying things he might reasonably have preferred not to hear.
She thought of the shore, before the women appeared. The stillness of it. Six inches of morning air and the sound of the tide and the particular gravity of the moment—the way time had seemed briefly to pause, not dramatically, not the way it did in novels, but quietly, privately, in the way of something that was happening before either person had decided to let it.
Her heart did the thing it had been doing for three days, which she had been firmly and consistently instructing it to stop doing.
It did not stop.
She looked back at the window.
“Rakes do not need rumors.” Her voice was even, low, the voice of a woman who had reached a reasonable conclusion and was comfortable with it. “They are perfectly capable of generating their own difficulties without any assistance from the press.” She smoothed her skirt. “Whatever ink has made of him, he is stilla man who was found unconscious on a beach at five in the morning after a party that had kept him until dawn, and that is simply a fact and not a characterization.”
Beatrice and Margaret exchanged a look. It was the kind of look that communicated an entire conversation in under a second, and Cecily chose to ignore it completely.
“Are we nearly done with the ribbon?” she asked.
“Nearly,” Margaret replied serenely.
Cecily looked at the dress. At the ivory silk and the careful, neat ribbon and the whole impossible reality of Thursday waiting at the end of three short days.
He is nothing like I imagined.
And then, quieter, underneath it, the thought she was less comfortable with.
He is nothing like I imagined, and I cannot seem to stop thinking about him, which is inconvenient and foolish, and I am going to stop immediately.
She did not stop.
