He reached Elinor and Annabelle. His sister beamed at him, then glanced between the two of them with the expression of a woman who believed she was witnessing something beautiful and did not wish to intrude upon it.
“I promised Lord Callum a turn about the room,” Annabelle announced, with the transparent innocence of someone who had made no such promise.
She squeezed Elinor’s hand and disappeared into the crowd.
Elinor watched her go. “She is not subtle.”
“She has never been.” Lucien stood beside her at the window. Below them, the Whitfield gardens lay silvered in moonlight, the hedgerows casting long shadows across the gravel paths. “You look beautiful tonight.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it is always true.”
She turned to face him, and the steadiness he had seen from across the room was still there, close enough now to feel. It was not the nervousness of their early encounters, not the breathless flush of the garden alcove, not the careful composure of a woman maintaining a ruse. It was something quieter and more certain, and it unsettled him.
“Dance with me,” he said.
“Of course, Your Grace,” she said and placed her hand in his, and the contact moved through him the way it always did, a current that started at his fingertips and settled behind his sternum.
He led her to the floor, and the orchestra began a waltz. Lucien placed his hand on her waist, and Elinor’s fingers rested on his shoulder, and they moved together with the ease of two people who had stopped pretending that the choreography between them required effort.
“Dominic asked me about our wedding arrangements,” he said.
Elinor’s step faltered. She recovered, but her hand tightened on his shoulder. “What did you tell him?”
“That there is time.”
“Is there?”
The question sat between them as they turned. Around them, the ballroom continued. Ladies in bright silks, lords in darktailcoats, the chandeliers casting prismatic light across the marble floor. All of it felt remote, as though they were dancing inside a painting of a ballroom rather than the ballroom itself.
“Two weeks,” Elinor said. “The Season ends in two weeks.”
“I know.”
“And then our arrangement ends with it.”
“I know that, too.”
She looked at him with those blue eyes that had, somewhere between a crumbling workhouse and a jasmine-covered alcove, become the fixed point around which his entire life had reorganized itself.
He could feel the distance she was keeping. Not physical. Emotional. The careful space of a woman who had decided something and was waiting for the right moment to act on it.
“Lucien,” she began.
“Look at them,” a voice cut through the music.
Lady Forsythe, the same woman from the gallery, had positioned herself near the edge of the dance floor with two companions, and her voice carried the projection of someone who intended to be overheard.
“I must say, it has been a most curious Season,” Lady Forsythe continued. “A duke choosing a wallflower. I wonder if perhaps a wager was involved. Young men do make such foolish bets …”
The ballroom did not go silent. That was not how these things worked. Instead, the conversations nearest to Lady Forsythe dimmed, heads turning with the lazy precision of people who did not wish to appear as though they were listening but intended to hear every word.
Lucien stopped dancing.
Elinor’s hand tightened on his. “Lucien. Leave it.”
He did not leave it.
