“No one saw me. I was careful.”
“You were throwingpebblesat mywindow.”
“Small ones.”
Her mouth pressed into a line that was trying not to be amused. Lucien knew he did not deserve even that much, not after the week he had given her, but the sight of her standing in the garden in her nightclothes and her crooked cloak and her spectacles catching the moonlight made his chest ache with a precision he had no defense against.
“Come with me,” he said. “Please.”
“It is too risky.”
“You sneak out of this house on a regular basis to teach orphans in a former workhouse. You have done it for months. This is no different.”
She held his gaze, her jaw set, and then she glanced up at her window once more. Whatever she saw, or did not see, decided for her. She sighed and followed him around the side of the house to where his carriage waited in a lane that the street lamps did not reach.
He handed her up and climbed in after her. The carriage moved before either of them spoke, the driver already instructed.
“Where are we?”
The apartment was above a tailor’s shop on a quiet street south of Mayfair. Two rooms, simply furnished: a sitting room with afireplace and a desk, a small bedroom beyond. No portraits, no family crests, nothing that announced the man who owned it. It could have belonged to anyone, and Elinor suspected that was the point.
“I come here when I need privacy from the duchy,” Lucien told her. He moved through the space with the ease of long familiarity, lighting a second lamp, stoking the fire. “From Fairmont House, from the ton, from being His Grace. This is where I am Lucien and nothing more.”
Elinor looked at the bare walls. The single shelf of books. The absence of anything that resembled the wealth he wore in public. She had expected something gilded. Something performative. This was the opposite. This room was honest, and the honesty of it unsettled her more than any luxury could have.
“Why did you come to my house tonight?” she asked. “Were you going to keep throwing pebbles until I woke?”
Lucien paused. “You were already awake.”
Her chin lifted. “How could you possibly know that?”
“You came to the window too quickly. If I had woken you, you would have been disoriented.” He set two glasses on the desk and poured brandy into each. “You were lying in bed, thinking, and the pebbles gave you a reason to stop.”
She did not like how well he read her. She did not like the way her pulse quickened at the proof of his attention, the evidence that he had been watching her closely enough to know the difference between sleep and restlessness.
He handed her a glass. Their fingers brushed, and neither of them pulled away.
Elinor sat in the chair by the fire. Lucien sat across from her. The fire crackled between them.
“What happened at the garden party was a lapse in judgment,” he said. His voice had gone careful, measured, the tone he used when he was constructing walls in real time. “I should not have touched you.”
The words hit her like cold water. She had spent a week replaying that alcove in her mind, and he was calling it a lapse.
“Then don’t do it again.” She kept her voice level. “If I mean nothing to you, Lucien, then do not do it again.”
His shoulders dropped. He looked at the fire instead of at her, and the avoidance told her more than his words had.
“Do you truly believe you mean nothing to me?”
“You vanished for a week.” The composure she had assembled in the carriage cracked. “You did not write. You did not visit LyraHouse. The children asked where you were, and I had no answer, because I did not have one for myself.”
He put his head in his hands.
“Who would want a wallflower with spectacles and an interest in astronomy?” Her voice rose, filling the small room. “You have the attention of every woman in London. You could walk into any ballroom and leave with anyone. Why on earth would you want me, and why would you run from me after what happened in that alcove?”
Lucien lifted his head. His eyes were raw, stripped of charm, stripped of performance, and the nakedness of his expression stopped her.
“Because I want you,” he said. “Desperately. All to myself. And that is the problem, Elinor, because I am not good for you. I am a corrupted man. I have spent half my life bedding women I felt nothing for, wearing a mask so convincing that most days I cannot find my own face beneath it. My uncle raised me after my father died. He was a cruel man, and I have spent eleven years wondering how much of him I carry.”
