“Correct.” He drank. “And yet…”
A neighboring table erupted into laughter. One of the card rooms had produced a winner, by the sound of it.
Dominic looked at the fire until it settled.
“I feel obliged to remind you that I was at the masquerade,” Miles said. “I was standing a good deal closer to that waltz than I needed to be.” He set his glass down. “I watched you cross a dance floor for her. I watched you take her hand. I also noticed when you were no longer in the room. And when she came back through the far door, some minutes after, from the direction you had gone.”
Dominic said nothing even though his grip tightened briefly around the glass in his hand.
“I’ve said nothing about this for a week,” Miles said. “I’m saying it now because I think you need to hear it again.” He paused. “James also mentioned Lady Annabelle’s name four times in the course of a three-minute conversation when I last saw him.”
Dominic looked at him. “And what exactly are you driving at now? What is it I need to hear again?”
At that, Miles’ lips spread in a smile that told Dominic that he’d walked right into his friend’s trap. “Well, it is rather a simple statement, really. Lady Annabelle Stanton. I suppose those words should suffice, should they not?”
Dominic got to his feet, buttoned his coat, and said his goodnights without further ado. Through it all, his friend was laughing at him, and he contemplated ignoring the man for a few weeks until this fiasco with Annabelle died down.
Outside, the street was clear after a summer downpour, the cobbles still wet under the lamps.
And, after a brief contemplation, Dominic sent the carriage home without him and walked.
Walking had served, as a rule, when his mind ran in directions he did not want. Cold and movement together had a useful quality: they forced the immediate to the surface and kept it there. He had relied on this since he was old enough to leave the house on his own.
Tonight, they were not serving.
The difficulty, and he was honest enough at this hour to use that word, was not just the kiss. He had managed worse than a kiss and the subsequent retreat of the woman involved, and the rational response was civil brevity and time and the ordinary conduct of a man who had done nothing that warranted preoccupation. He had those resources available to him. He had been applying them, with occasional lapses that he did not intend to catalog.
The difficulty was also Annabelle’s observation.
She had been there at each event, noting each exit, adding each to a tally she had apparently kept quietly and decided, at some point on a cold balcony, was significant enough to say aloud.
He had moved through those rooms for the better part of two months under the assumption that departures made in good order went unremarked.
He had been wrong about this entirely.
And the more he considered it, the worse it was, because he had not known she was. She had been that attentive to him, for that long, without making anything of it. Without performing it. Without expecting anything back from it.
He could not name another person, living, who had looked at him that closely without wanting something in return for the attention.
She had not said it to wound him. She had said it because it was accurate, and she withheld almost nothing that was accurate, and she had not looked away from his face while she said it. She had not followed him onto that balcony to make a point. She had gone out because his face had been, as she put it, wrong, and she had found that worth acting on, and she had not looked away from any of it.
He did not know what to do with a woman who looked at him like that.
Twenty minutes later, he turned down Chandos Street. He had been here before, and he knew the way.
Madame Laurent kept its front door unremarkable by design: black paint, an ordinary knocker, a terrace that gave nothing away to passersby. The footman who admitted him had seen him once before, perhaps eight or nine months ago, and took his hat without comment.
The downstairs parlor was warm, with lamplight and firelight in the right proportions, the kind of arrangement that was clearly not accidental. Three women were already in the room; a fourth came through the far door as he entered.
The woman who had just come through was tall, with hair the color of pale amber under the lamp, and green eyes when she turned them his way.
Not dark hair. Not blue eyes. Good. Nothing like her.
Madame Laurent appeared at his elbow, quiet-footed and experienced in the greeting of men who did not want conversation.
“Your Grace. It has been some time.”
“It has.” He was looking at the fair-haired woman.
