A request to erase the very substance of her being. To sand down her sharp edges, to quiet her inconvenient thoughts, to become one of the smiling, silent, sibilant women who populated this world.
A hot, furious shame washed through her, so potent it threatened to choke her. Blood rose in her cheeks, a traitorous blush broadcasting her humiliation to the entire room.
She yearned to stand up, to throw her napkin on the table, to stride out of this gilded cage and back to the honest world of mud and horses and open sky of Fairhaven.
Instead, she drew a breath, forced her lips into a brittle approximation of a smile, and looked directly at the eldest Goode sister. “But who would be the family’s designated scandal-maker, Nora?” she quipped, her voice tight with defensive irony. “It seems the position has been vacated recently, and I do hate to see an idle opportunity.”
Mercy, who had been watching the entire exchange with eyes that missed nothing, coughed violently into her wine glass, her shoulders shaking with what was clearly not a respiratory ailment. She raised the glass to her lips to hide a grin, her azure eyes sparkling with wicked amusement over the rim. “A position most recently held by me,” she chuckled. A single, defiant note of support in a symphony of disapproval.
Emmaline smiled ruefully at her sister.
The conversation resumed its flow, but for Emmaline, the current had shifted, leaving her stranded on an island of misery. She retreated into herself, a spectator at her own family’s dinner party. She watched Mercy charm the florid-faced baronet, her wit a bright, sharp thing that deflected his pomposity without giving offense. She saw Felicity engaged in a quiet, intense conversation with a scholarly gentleman, her amber eyes alight with intellectual fervor. Rosaline chatted about astronomy with their neighbor, the Earl of Wheeldon.
Her beloved siblings… They navigated these treacherous waters with such inherent skill, while she, Emma, could only ever seem to crash against the rocks.
Nora’s careful words echoed in her mind—be less—and a cold knot of despair tightened in her stomach.
She was tracing the pattern of her water glass with a fingertip, lost in thought, when the dining room doors banged open and the butler cleared his throat with enough drama to warrant an audience.
“Her Grace, the Duchesse de la Coeur.”
The room froze, as if the very announcement had doused all conversation in a bucket of ice.
Emma looked up, the name turning to ash in her mouth.
Amélie Beauchamp, the Duchesse de la Coeur.
She was all potent essence, her age distilled into grace rather than whittled into bitterness. Her gown was the color of a midnight sky, a deep, fathomless blue silk that whispered against the floor and seemed to drink the candlelight. It was cut with a daring simplicity that spoke of Parisian ateliers and absolute confidence. Dark hair, the color of polished jet, was swept up in an elegant style, secured by a single, ornate pin that looked carved from a magic wand. She moved with the deliberate, fluid agility of a dancer, her posture straight, her shoulders set with a poise that felt less like training and more like an innate claim to the space she occupied.
Inflate your lungs, Emma ordered her traitorous body.
She simply couldn’t when she looked at the duchesse.
The high cheekbones, the olive tint of her skin, the knowing, almost sorrowful curve of her full lips. But it was her eyes that seized Emma’s attention—dark, expressive, and intelligent, holding a hint of amused weariness, as if she had seen all the world’s follies and decided to be entertained by them rather than dismayed.
The duchesse’s gaze swept the room, a cool, assessing glance that acknowledged everyone and lingered on no one.
Until Emma.
Not a glance, nor a glare, and yet it landed with devastating physical impact.
A jolt, sharp and electric, shot through Emma’s body, from the base of her spine to the tips of her fingers. A dizzying heat bloomed in her cheeks, a furious, mortifying blush that had nothing to do with her earlier gaffe and everything to do with the woman standing in the doorway. Her pulse, which had been a sullen thud, began to hammer against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Emma very carefully made a dedicated study of the congealed sauce on her uneaten squab, but the image of the duchesse was burned onto the inside of her eyelids. The physical reaction was so violent, so involuntary, it terrified her. It was accompanied by a familiar, sickening wave of shame, the old, secret horror she had spent years burying, pretending it did not exist.
This feeling—this breathless, consuming awareness of a woman—was her deepest, most guarded flaw.
And this continental stranger had unearthed it with a single look.
The duchesse was seated, her placement at the host’s right causing a minor shuffling of the other guests as she made lovely apologies for her tardiness.
A tardiness that might have been constructed to make just such an entrance?
Emma risked a glance from beneath her lashes. She couldn’t stop herself. She watched as the duchesse unfurled her napkin with a quiet economy of movement. She watched the long, elegant line of her throat as she sipped her wine. She noted the strength in her hands, the fingers long and capable, not fragile and ornamental.
Emma watched, transfixed, as the duchesse inclined her head to her sister Pru, then to Nora, before allowing her gaze to sweep the length of the table. It passed over Mercy—who smiled with genuine delight—over Felicity—who nearly dropped her pen—and finally landed on Emma.
The contact was brief, but it detonated something inside her, a shock so sudden she nearly toppled her glass. The duchesse’s eyes were an unplaceable color, neither blue nor green nor gray but a shifting amalgam of all three, and when they fixed on Emma, it felt as though every hidden, shameful part of herself had been laid bare.
