CHAPTER 1
“Imust say, Lord Harwick, your dedication to this particular metaphor is truly extraordinary.”
Lord Harwick blinked. He had been comparing Isadora’s eyes to the sea for the better part of three minutes, going on and on about the deep, fathomless sea twice, and had apparently not considered that she might find this less moving than he intended.
“I… I only mean to say,” he pressed on, with the particular confidence of a man who had never once been told he was boring, “that a lady of your refinement deserves?—”
“You are very kind,” Isadora cut in pleasantly. “If you will excuse me.”
She turned before he could gather himself for another round, slipped neatly between two couples navigating the edge of the dance floor, and did not look back.
The sea. She had heard variations on the sea for three consecutive Seasons now, and she was beginning to develop a rather personal grievance against large bodies of water.
The ballroom was, by any reasonable account, magnificent. The Duchess of Fernleigh had outdone herself with candlelight everywhere, dripping from chandeliers the size of small carriages, catching the crystal and the silver and the jewels around every throat in the room.
The flowers alone must have cost a fortune, as the white roses banked against every column, their fragrance thick and heady in the warm air. On the far side of the room, the orchestra was in excellent form, and the dancers moved beneath the light like something out of a painting—all color and motion and practiced grace.
It was, by every measure, a beautiful evening.
Isadora found it exhausting.
She paused near the edge of the room, where the crowd thinned slightly, and the air was marginally cooler, and pressed one gloved hand against the other in a gesture that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with keeping her composure.
Across the room, she could see Letitia. Her younger sister’s hair was bright beneath the chandeliers, her expression luminous with the joy of someone encountering a grand ballroom during their first Season and finding it entirely as wonderful asexpected. She was laughing at something a young man had said. She had been laughing all evening.
Good,t at least one of us is enjoying themselves.The thought filled her with genuine warmth and only a small, private ache.
She looked for William next and found him easily. Her brother occupied rooms the way he occupied most things, with a natural authority that required no effort. He was speaking with a small group near the doorway, tall and composed, and Cecily stood at his side with her hand lightly on his arm.
Even across the room, even in a crowd of over two hundred, the way William angled himself toward his wife and the way he looked at her made the observation feel almost like an intrusion.
That was what Isadora wanted. Not the poetry about the sea. Not the flattering speeches from Lords whose names she had already half-forgotten. But that quiet, certain gravity that pulled two people toward each other in a room full of other people, without either of them seeming to notice it happening.
The orchestra moved into a new set. A gentleman she recognized vaguely—Lord Whitfield, or possibly Whitmore, she could never remember—began walking purposefully in her direction with the look of a man who had been working up his nerve for half an hour.
Isadora turned away.
She did not do it hastily. She simply found a gap in the crowd and stepped into it. Then she kept moving with the composed expression of having somewhere to be, which she absolutely did not.
She was becoming rather good at this. Three Seasons had taught her certain useful things.
She turned away from the dancers and walked directly into a solid, warm chest.
“Careful.” A hand shot out to steady her, gone almost before she registered it.
Isadora looked up.
Oh.
She had years of practice at looking at James Harcliffe and arriving at the same conclusion, which was that it was entirely unfair for a man to look the way he did while also being the way he was.
Her brother’s oldest and closest friend was tall, the kind of tall that announced itself in a doorway and broad through the shoulders in a way that his coat acknowledged rather than disguised. He was possessed of the physical ease of a man who occupied his own body without apology or effort. His dark brown hair was always slightly less ordered than fashion strictlyrequired, which she had long suspected was a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
His jaw appeared to have been designed with some structural intention, and his hazel-green eyes were sharp, the kind of eyes that were always doing something, always reading the room or the person or the space between the two, even when the rest of him was performing carelessness.
He was, in short, exactly as handsome as he had been the last time she had seen him, which had also been inconvenient.
He stood before her with his glass tilted safely to the side, his expression already arranging itself into the ease he wore the way other men wore their coats—effortlessly, as though it had been cut for him.
