“I felt it appropriate to deliver it before he had any further opportunity to present himself as something he isn’t.”
“In front of eight people.”
“He left of his own judgment.”
She set her glass on the balustrade. Her hands needed somewhere to be, and the rail was the safest available surface. “You made sure of it. That is not his judgment…that isyours.”
He said nothing to that, infuriating her even more. “What is Chalk Farm?” she said.
He looked at her.
“I know what Chalk Farm is,” she said. “I want to know what your story about it was.”
“He was called out two years ago. He accepted, arranged a second, confirmed the location and the hour.” He paused. “He didn’t appear.”
She held this for a moment. “Men miss appointments.”
“He had his pistol cleaned the evening before. He sent someone to check the ground. At four in the morning he dressed, called for his horse, and rode in the other direction.” He met her gaze. “Fenn waited an hour.”
She said nothing. She looked at the garden below.
“You have done this before,” she said at last. “Lucien’s ball, the suitor you warned me about. Lord Penworth at the Mallory soiree. And tonight.” She held his gaze. “Every man who has approached me this season, you have found the defect and produced it at the first opportunity.”
“The pattern is that the men who approach you have things to conceal.”
“Some of them.”
“All of them, so far.”
“And your solution is to humiliate them on terraces.” She watched him. He met it without moving. “For my benefit.”
“For your benefit. Yes.” He did not even sound the least bit remorseful or ashamed.
“You commissioned a report on him,” she said, and he held her gaze for a stretch of time without answering, and the not-answering told her what the answer was.
“Did you?” She heard what was in her own voice and did not take it back. “You had someone make inquiries. For my benefit.”
“Yes.”
“I see.” She turned away from him briefly and looked at the garden, the dark shapes of the flower beds, the smell of something cool and green in the night air. Then she looked back. “And at the ball? And the Mallory soiree? Was that a report, or simply your own judgment?”
“My own judgment.”
“Your own judgment,” she repeated. “Which you have deployed consistently across this season, on every man who expressed any sincere interest in me. And what happens next season? And the one after that? You think no man can be decent because you cannot make yourself believe decency is real. You think no one can be happy.” Her voice dropped to the register whereshe stopped measuring it. “Becauseyouare not. And you want everyone in the same dark room you have shut yourself in.”
“I am trying to keep you from?—”
“You are trying to keep me from everything.” She did not raise her voice. There was no need for it; the terrace was quiet enough, and so was she. “From a man who may have been dishonest, from a man who may not have been… from the ordinary risks of an ordinary life. You are very accomplished at finding reasons why every person around you should stay at the same careful distance.” She paused. “You despise yourself. And because of it, you have decided no one around you deserves any better.”
She picked up her glass.
“Annabelle.” He said her name at last, without the title, without any form of address at all, and she stopped with her hand not yet on the door.
“He is a coward,” Dominic said. Now, his voice was low and entirely without ornament. “A man who runs at four in the morning runs in drawing rooms too. He will run from debt, and from appointments, and from anything that requires him to stand still and face something. You would have seen it eventually. That is why I could not let him near you.”
She stopped with her hand on the latch.
The drawing room was on the other side: warm and lit, full of the ordinary sounds of an evening proceeding entirely as planned. She stood at the threshold with that last sentence still in her ears; not the account of Chesham, not the cowardice, not the appointment at Chalk Farm—but the wordcould. Notshould. Notought.
