He finally rose and executed his bow. She stood with him, escorting him to the drawing room door, and the proximity caught him entirely off guard. The morning light filtered behind her again, illuminating the faint shadow of her collarbone beneath the muslin. A tiny, previously unnoticed freckle rested at the very base of her throat. He suspected he would spend an inordinate amount of time trying to forget it existed.
She smelled of lavender. He had filed the scent away upon entering, dismissing it as background detail among the furniture wax and garden daisies. Now, standing close enough that they shared the same narrow column of air, the lavender became specific. It belonged to her. His body, which had spent the last twenty-three minutes behaving with dutiful decorum, violently rebelled. It informed him, with a dark and sudden urgency, exactly what it would be like to press his mouth against that single freckle and breathe her in.
He forced himself to take a deliberate half step back. “Thank you for the tea, Miss Goodall.”
“Thank you for the violets, Your Grace,” she replied, her voice remaining perfectly even. “They are very fine. I shall try not to read anything into them.”
He allowed his gaze to drop to her mouth before slowly tracking back to her eyes. “And if you did read something into them?”
“I would read carefully. I always do.”
He stepped out into the bright Tuesday morning, the brass-polished door clicking shut behind him. The street noise rushed in, too loud and too close, but it did nothing to dispel the lingering warmth of her finger against his knuckle. He adjusted his coat, signaled for his carriage, and climbed inside without allowing himself a backward glance, but the effort of keeping his eyes forward cost him far more than he cared to admit.
As the carriage rattled toward Grosvenor Square, the narrow street receding through the glass, he attempted to reconstruct his strategy. He had arrived intending to deploy practiced charm, meaning to flatter a forgotten woman into a trap. Instead, he had been dismantled by a lady who poured tea with steady hands and carried her four seasons of invisibility without a single ounce of bitterness.
She had accepted his violets, judged them against her own daisies, and found the hothouse blooms wanting.
He leaned his head back against the squabs and thought of Devlin. Five thousand pounds and the Andalusian stallion. The wager recorded in the betting book at White’s, Imogen Goodall’s name inscribed next to a sum of money, completely without her knowledge. A cold, unfamiliar weight settled heavily in his chest. The sensation carried the distinct, unpleasant flavor of shame, an emotion he had successfully avoided for the better part of a decade.
Collins waited in the front hall when he arrived. The valet took one look at Ash’s face and maintained a disapproving silence, his rigid posture communicating volumes.
Ash stripped off his gloves, rotated his signet ring inward, hiding the cameo against his palm where it belonged, and retreated upstairs to his writing desk. He sat for a long time staring at the blank parchment. He could not write to Devlin without offering either a lie or a confession, and he possessed the stomach for neither. He simply turned the gold band around his finger, acknowledging the foreign tension behind his ribs, a quiet realization that something new had taken root in the empty spaces of his life and was stubbornly refusing to leave.
Chapter Four
“He is a Hambridge, Imogen. They breed three things in that family. Beautiful sons, broken hearts, and rakes. Your duke has the first, will hand you the second, and is the third on legs.”
Bethany Mercer had let herself in through the connecting garden door before Aunt Margery had cleared the tea things, which meant she had been listening. She had heard every word, which meant Imogen was going to have to discuss the Duke of Ravenhurst’s morning call with a woman who had opinions about dukes as reliably as other women had opinions about weather.
“He is not my duke, Bethany.”
“He brought you violets. He stayed twenty-three minutes. Your aunt counted.” Bethany settled herself into the chair Ash had occupied not ten minutes earlier, her dark hair pinned in its usual severe arrangement, her face carrying the particular expression it wore when she was being protective and did not wish to be thanked for it. “A man who brings violets to a woman he has danced with once is either courting or hunting, and I have yet to see a Hambridge do the former.”
“You have never met a Hambridge.”
“I have read about them. The papers are very thorough. His grandfather kept a woman in Kensington for eleven years and left her nothing. His father was better, by all accounts, but his father married for love, and love in that family appears to be an aberration rather than a trait.” Bethany picked up the cold teacup at her elbow, looked into it, and set it down. “I am not telling you what to do, Imogen. I am telling you what he is.”
Imogen sat very still for a moment, her hands in her lap, and she wanted to argue. She wanted to say that the man who had sat in this chair and laughed at her jests about potted palmsand drunk her middling tea without complaint was not the man Bethany was describing. She wanted to say that his eyes had been real, that the laugh and the twenty-three minutes had been real.
She said none of it. Bethany was her oldest and sharpest friend, and she had been right about men before. Imogen was not yet certain enough of her own judgment to stake it against six seasons of Bethany’s observation.
“I will be careful,” she said.
“Careful…” Bethany repeated the word as if testing it for structural integrity and finding it insufficient. “Careful is what a woman says before she does something reckless, Imogen. Careful is not a strategy. It is a prayer.” She paused. Her fingers, Imogen noticed, were wrapped tightly around the arm of the chair, and the tension in them did not match the evenness of her voice. “I am not trying to be cruel. I am trying to be your friend while you still want one.”
“I will always want you as my friend, Bethany.”
“You say that now. Women who fall in love with men their friends have warned them about tend to revise their guest lists eventually. I have seen it happen three times in six seasons and I should rather not be the fourth.”
The words sat between them. Imogen wanted to say that she was not falling in love, that a single country dance, a morning call and a pair of hothouse violets did not constitute falling. The warmth on her knuckle was a physical fact and not an emotion, but the distinction felt thinner than it should have, and Bethany’s dark eyes were watching her with a steadiness that left very little room for self-deception.
Bethany looked at her for a long moment. Then rose, kissed Imogen’s cheek, and let herself out through the garden door without another word. The latch clicked and the morning roomwas quiet again. The violets on the mantelpiece looked, in the sudden stillness, as if they were holding their breath.
***
Three days passed. Three days in which Imogen neither saw nor heard from the Duke of Ravenhurst, and, most irritating of all, she could not stop thinking about him. She had given him no permission to take up residence in her thoughts. Yet, he had done so all the same without lease or any other arrangement, installing himself in the corners of her mind as comfortably as he had once installed himself in the gilt chair at the Marchmont: uninvited and entirely at ease.
She thought about the laugh. The real one, the one that had escaped before he could shape it. She thought about the twenty-three minutes, the middling tea and the simple undeniable fact that he had drunk her tea without complaint and had looked at her drawing room without pity. He had sat in a chair with a turned carpet beneath it and had not once, not for a single second, made her feel as if her poverty were something she needed to apologize for. That was the thing she could not stop returning to. Not his face, his title or the particular manner in which he moved through a room, as if rooms existed primarily for his convenience, but the absence of condescension, and how rare that absence was. How it had made the worn little drawing room feel, briefly, like a place where she was allowed to be exactly who she was. She had been invisible for four seasons and had come to expect invisibility, but the Duke of Ravenhurst had looked at her, and the looking had not felt like being evaluated, appraised or assessed for potential. It had felt like being seen. The difference between those things, between being looked at and being seen, was a difference she had not known existed until he sat in her morning room and showed it to her. Now she could not pretend she did not know it, and that was theproblem. Bethany would have told her this if she had known, but she probably did know, and that was probably why she had not smiled.
