He looked like a man falling.
“Goodnight, Mary,” he said. He eased his finger free from Tommy’s grip, slowly, as though the act cost him something. “Or good morning, I suppose.”
“Goodnight.” She smiled. “Thank you for tonight. For telling me the truth.”
Evander nodded. He turned and walked to the door, and this time, when he paused at the threshold, he looked back. Not at the baby. At her.
“The sapphire,” he said. “For the Atherton ball. You will look extraordinary.”
He left before she could respond. His footsteps faded down the corridor, and his door closed, and the house settled into the stillness that preceded dawn.
Mary sat in the rocking chair beside Tommy’s crib and watched the light change. Gray to silver to the pale gold of early morning, creeping across the nursery floor, finding the edges of the curtains, warming the room by degrees.
Tommy slept through all of it, his breathing steady, his fists curled in the pose of perfect surrender.
Mary pressed her fingers to her lips. They were tender. The memory made her breath catch. His hands. His mouth. Hisfingers. The way he had watched her face as though her pleasure mattered more than his own, as though giving her that was the one thing he could offer without reservation.
Mary rocked the chair, stared at the ceiling, and tried to organize her thoughts into something manageable.
The man who proposed marriage like a business transaction was the same man who told a fox story to a crying baby in a dark hallway, his voice rusty and uncertain.
The man who sent housekeepers to ask questions he could not bring himself to ask in person was the same man who walked into boxing rings and pleasure houses, night after night, searching for a brother who had left destruction in his wake.
The man who fled breakfast rather than face the woman he had kissed was the same man who whisperedI do not trust myself around youwith his hand on her jaw.
They were not different men. The coldness and the tenderness, the walls and the cracks in them, the discipline and the wanting that lived beneath it. All of it belonged to the same person.
And Mary was falling for every part of him.
She was falling. The realization did not arrive with thunder or fanfare. It settled over her quietly, the way morning settled over the nursery, one degree of light at a time, until everything was illuminated and there was no pretending she could not see.
Mary looked at Tommy sleeping in his crib. She had come here for Tommy. She had stayed for duty.
Now, she was staying for something else.
CHAPTER 19
“Blackholm, stop fidgeting. You look like a man awaiting sentencing.”
Quentin leaned against the pillar at the top of the Atherton ballroom stairs, a glass of champagne already in his hand, his evening coat immaculate, his grin insufferable.
The ballroom below glittered with candlelight, crystal, and three hundred members of the ton arranged in clusters of silk and judgment.
“I do not fidget,” Evander said.
“You have adjusted your cravat four times since we arrived. I counted.”
“The knot is uneven.”
“The knot is perfect. You are nervous.” Quentin sipped his champagne. “I find this delightful. Genuinely. The Duke of Blackholm, nervous about a ball. I should write it down for posterity.”
“Write it down and I will end our friendship.”
“You have ended our friendship eleven times. I remain undeterred.”
Evander turned from the ballroom to the entrance, where guests were still arriving, announced by the Athertons’ butler in a voice that carried like cannon fire. Lord and Lady Penlock. Lord Charles and Lady Whitfield. Names he recognized, faces he could navigate. Thetonwas a machine, and Evander understood machines.
What he did not understand was why his pulse had not settled since Harding announced that the Duchess was ready and waiting in the entrance hall.
