Rowan studied her another moment, then bent and pressed his mouth to her forehead.
It was too gentle.
When he left her there and the door closed between them, Emmeline stood in the quiet of her chamber with one hand pressed to the place his lips had touched, already feeling the first crack widen beneath her feet.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“She has been pale for two days,” Rowan said, and hated how the words sounded the moment they left his mouth.
Frederick looked up from his glass with one brow raised, lounging in his chair as the club around them hummed with low conversation and clinking glasses.
“Women are occasionally pale,” Frederick said. “It is one of their mysterious accomplishments.”
Rowan’s fingers tightened around his glass. “She nearly fainted after returning from her walk.”
A quick flash of something too sharp to be amusement moved through Frederick’s eyes. Then it was gone, hidden beneath his usual idle charm.
“Did she say why?” Frederick asked, though his tone had lost some of its lazy amusement.
He shifted in his chair, one elbow still hooked over the armrest, but his fingers had gone still around the bowl of his glass.
“She said she was tired.”
Frederick watched him for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then his mouth tilted. “Perhaps she was tired.”
Rowan did not smile. The brandy sat untouched before him, amber beneath the lamplight.
He could still see Emmeline as she had stood in the hall two nights ago, too still, her honey-brown eyes bright with something he had not been able to name. Exhaustion, perhaps. He had touched her elbow and felt the slight tremor run through her before she hid it from him.
That was what unsettled him most—the possibility that something within her body had begun to fail quietly while she smiled through it for everyone else’s comfort.
“She is not herself,” he said, lower now. “She smiles when Aaron speaks to her. She answers me properly. She allows me near.” His jaw tightened because the memory of that permission struck his blood with heat even now. “But something is wrong.”
Frederick swirled his drink without looking at him. “You have become remarkably observant.”
Rowan’s gaze sharpened. “I have always been observant.”
Frederick sighed faintly and leaned back, though tonight even that gesture lacked its usual elegance. There was restlessness in him, a tension in his shoulders, a faint impatience in the fingers tapping once against the side of his glass.
“What is the matter with you?” Rowan asked.
“With me?” Frederick blinked too quickly. “Nothing at all.”
“You are restless.”
“I am always restless.”
“Not like this.”
Frederick’s mouth curved, but color touched his cheekbones in a way Rowan had never seen before.
“Well,” Frederick said lightly, taking too large a swallow of brandy, “if you must know, the dancer is on my mind again.”
Rowan stared at him.
Frederick lifted both brows, his mouth curving with easy indecency, though the color along his cheekbones had not quite faded. “Do not look so grave. A man is occasionally permitted to think of a woman.”
Rowan studied him over the rim of his glass. “This dancer has taken quite a bit of your mind lately.”
