Lord, but she was breathtaking. The very act of breathing the same air felt both profane and exhilarating. Emma felt large, clumsy, her practical dress a sack, her calloused hands objects of grotesque utility. How could she possibly eat, chew, swallow, in the presence of such a creature?
“What interesting conversation have I so rudely imposed upon?” the duchesse asked in a voice dripping with unapologetic honey.
The baronet, his face even more flushed, resumed his political discourse. “Your Grace, we were just discussing the necessity of the Corn Laws for national stability. I’m not certain you’d have an opinion on the matter.”
The duchesse smiled, a slow, captivating curve of her lips. She did not look at him, but at the flame of a nearby candle, as if it were a more interesting conversationalist. “Ah, yes. The stability of the roof, maintained by cracking the foundations,” she said, her voice a low melody with the ghost of a French accent. “A most peculiar theory of nationalistic political architecture, is it not? So ubiquitous it’s almost boring.”
The words were almost identical in sentiment to what Emma had said. Yet where Emma’s had been a stone, thrown bluntly into the placid pond of conversation, the duchesse’s were a perfectly skipped pebble, creating elegant, widening ripples of meaning. The wit was effortless, the observation lethal, the delivery a masterpiece of social grace.
Emma felt the last of her composure shatter. To be so clumsy, and then to see her own clumsy thought rendered with such exquisite, devastating perfection by the very woman who had just electrified her to her soul—it was unendurable.
How, when she prided herself on being a callused, imperturbable woman, did she become a raw, open nerve around the duchesse?
“If you will excuse me,” she murmured, her voice a strangled whisper that was lost in the ensuing polite laughter. She pushed her chair back, the legs scraping harshly against the floor. “The heat… I am not feeling quite the thing.”
She did not wait for a response. She fled, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs, escaping the opulent room, escaping her family, escaping the terrifying, magnificent presence of the Duchesse de la Coeur.
Chapter 3
Sleep was a locked room to which Emma had lost the key. She lay in the cavernous guest bed and stared into the oppressive darkness of the canopy overhead. The house groaned around her, the unfamiliar sighs and creaks of a place settling for the night. But for Emma, there was no settling.
Be less.
Honoria’s whispered plea was a brand on her mind, a searing indictment of her very nature. To be less opinionated, less direct, less…Emmaline. The humiliation of that moment at the dinner table was a physical ache, a knot of shame lodged beneath her ribs.
She had always prided herself on practicality, on facing discomfort with a stoic, almost masculine resolve. But this was not discomfort. This was a fever in the blood, a kind of chemical derangement that left her limbs restless and her thoughts skittering from topic to topic, each one returning inevitably to the cool, dark eyes of the Duchesse de la Coeur.
The name alone was an invocation.
Emma squeezed her eyes shut, but the image was indelible: the midnight-blue silk, the aristocratic line of her jaw, the intelligent eyes that had met hers across the battlefield of the dining room. Emma’s body betrayed her even now, in the solitude of her bed. A phantom heat bloomed low in her belly, a treacherous current that made her flush from her collarbone to the roots of her hair. It was the old horror, the secret sickness she kept chained in the deepest dungeon of her soul, and this woman, this stranger, had picked the lock with a single glance.
In the meager pre-dawn silver light, Emma finally gave up. She dressed in her plainest muslin gown, threw a sturdy riding habit over the top, and crept down the servants’ stable path with the practiced skill of someone accustomed to avoiding unnecessary notice.
The beach, at this hour, belonged to the ghosts and the mad. The sky was a pale, bruised gray that barely distinguished itself from the shingled sand, and a thick mist rolled in from the water, low enough to muffle sound, but not to obscure the horizon.
Emma relished the isolation. She removed her boots, enjoying the sting of cold sand against her feet, the way it grounded her to the world in a way no drawing room ever could.
She walked, letting her thoughts unravel, the wind catching at her hair, the salt air scouring her lungs clean of the sickly perfumes of last night’s dinner. She walked until she could no longer see the house, until even its silhouette was erased by the fog.
* * *
A figure materialized out of the mist, a trick of light and movement so subtle that for a moment Emma thought she had imagined it.
A silhouette, stark against the nascent glow of dawn. The figure stood near the water, poised with an artist’s stillness before a small easel. Even from a distance, the posture was unmistakable in its elegance. Emma’s heart gave a sickening lurch.
The Duchesse.
Emma’s first instinct was raw panic. She would turn, retreat back into the gloom, unseen. To face that woman now, after her humiliating flight from dinner, was unthinkable. But as she began to back away, the figure turned its head, a slow, deliberate movement, as if she had been aware of Emma’s presence all along.
Emma nearly turned on her heel and fled.
But the duchesse smiled—not the practiced, devastating smile of the dinner table, but something smaller and more genuine. A smile that invited, rather than dazzled.
Emma froze, uncertain, her toes curling in the cold, damp sand.
“Come closer, Miss Goode,” Amélie called, her French accent lending the word a softness that made it sound like an endearment. “The sunrise is yours as much as mine.”
It was the easiest thing in the world to obey. She closed the distance, each step an act of surrender.
