“Because it makes it harder.”
The admission left her mouth before she could catch it, raw and unvarnished, and she watched his expression shift. The softness did not leave, but recognition entered alongside it. The understanding that she was not speaking about the orphanage, or the atlas, or the name above the door.
Lucien took a step closer. The space between them shrank to something that felt less like a room and more like a held breath.
“Harder,” he repeated.
“To pretend.”
She lifted her eyes to his. In the low light of the schoolroom, his green gaze held a warmth that had no business being there, not for a woman he had struck a bargain with, not for a wallflower who existed in his life only to deflect the ton’s matchmaking.
His hand lifted, and for one reckless, airless moment, she thought he would touch her face.
Instead, he adjusted her spectacles where they had slipped down her nose. His fingertips grazed her temple, feather-light, and Elinor forgot how to breathe.
“Then stop pretending,” he murmured.
The words hung between them. Elinor’s heart hammered against her ribs, and she could feel the heat of his hand still hovering near her face, close enough to feel but no longer touching, as though he had given her the choice of closing the distance or stepping back.
She stepped back.
Not because she wanted to, but because wanting to was precisely the problem.
“I should go,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “It is late, and my stepmother?—”
“I know.” He let his hand drop. The mask did not return, not entirely, but something closed behind his eyes. A door she had almost walked through, shutting before she could reach it. “I will see you at Lord Ashbury’s garden party tomorrow evening.”
“You will,” she confirmed.
She gathered her satchel and cloak and walked past him toward the door. At the threshold, she stopped.
“Lyra House,” she said, without turning around. “It is a beautiful name.”
She did not wait for his response. She moved through the corridor, down the staircase with its new railing, and out into the night where her hackney waited.
In the carriage, she opened the celestial atlas to the page on Lyra and pressed her palm flat against the star chart. The ink was cool beneath her fingers. The stars were fixed, immovable, ancient beyond reckoning.
Then stop pretending.
Elinor closed the book and held it against her chest for the entire ride home.
Chapter Sixteen
“You are grinding your teeth again, Fairmont.”
Dominic said it without looking at him. He stood beside Lucien on the stone terrace overlooking Lord Ashbury’s gardens, a glass of wine in his hand and an expression of careful amusement on his face.
Below them, the guests of the evening’s garden party drifted between hedgerows and lantern-lit pathways, their voices mingling with the soft strains of a quartet positioned near the fountain.
Lord Ashbury had fashioned himself a patron of the literary arts this Season, and the evening’s entertainment was a poetry reading held among the rose arbors. Lucien could not imagine a worse way to spend a night, but Elinor had accepted the invitation before he could invent an excuse, and the brightness in her eyes when she spoke of it had made refusal impossible.
She was down there now, seated in the second row of chairs arranged beneath the arbor, her celestial atlas tucked beside her on the bench. She had brought it as one might bring a talisman, and the sight of it had done something inconvenient to his chest when he noticed.
She was also, at this moment, being spoken to by a lord Lucien did not recognize.
The man stood too close. He leaned in when he spoke, his hand resting on the back of Elinor’s bench, his posture curved toward her with the calm confidence of a man who believed his attention was a gift. Elinor was listening politely, her chin tilted up, her spectacles catching the lantern light, and Lucien watched her nod at something the man said.
His jaw tightened.
