“I don’t mean that in the way women usually mean it when they say it to men they are trying to secure an offer from,” she said with honesty. “I mean that I genuinely like you. I have liked you for three years. I find you interesting, and I find you—I am not afraid of you, which I think is rarer than it should be.” She looked at him steadily. “I am telling you this so that what I say next is understood in that context.”
“Go on,” James allowed.
She straightened slightly. “I know your marriage is not a love match. I know the circumstances that led to it. Society knows too, though they say it in different ways depending on their position.” She paused. “Your wife married you for the child’s sake. You married her for the household’s sake. It is… but a practical arrangement, not a real marriage.”
She shifted in her seat when James remained silent.
“I know what I am offering,” she continued, the color slightly higher in her face now, her composure more effortful. “I know that it is not… that what I am saying is not conventional, but I would rather say it plainly than spend another season pretending I don’t feel it.” She met his gaze. “If you want, if there is any part of what might have existed between us that you still—” She broke off. “I am not asking for what she has. I am not asking for the name or the house or any of it. I am simply saying that if you wanted an… an arrangement, something private, I would not?—”
“Caroline,” he interrupted quietly.
He looked at her across the tea table—at the careful composure she was maintaining at considerable cost, at the courage it had taken to come here and say all of this, at the genuine feeling underneath the strategy of it. He had known Caroline Pembley for three years, and he had never disliked her. He did not dislike her now.
Which was precisely why he was going to be honest with her.
“I’m going to say something,” he said, “and I want you to hear it without the version that your pride will try to construct afterward. Can you do that?”
She looked at him steadily. “Yes.”
“Whatever might have existed between us three years ago, or six months ago, is over,” he declared. “Not because of my marriage. Not because of circumstances or timing or any external reasonyou could point to. But because…” He paused, looked at his glass, then looked back at her. “Because I am not available to you in any configuration. Not as a husband, not as an arrangement, not as anything that exists in private and not in public.”
He let that sink in.
“I will not take a mistress. I will not have a secret. I will not lead another life away from Ashbourne without her knowing.” He set the glass down. “That is not who I am now. I am not certain it is who I was before, but I am entirely certain it is not who I am now.”
Miss Caroline looked at him. Something moved through her expression. Not tears—she was not going to cry; he could see the decision being made in real time—but something that was not the rehearsed version she had arrived with. Something more honest.
“She is lucky,” she murmured.
“I am the one who is lucky,” James said. “Though I have been somewhat slow to fully understand that.”
Miss Caroline looked at the fire, then at the tea that neither of them had touched, then at her hands in her lap with the expression of a woman collecting herself.
“I thought—” She broke off.
“What did you think?”
“I thought that practical marriages stayed practical,” she said. “I thought that… that whatever the initial arrangement was, it would remain the arrangement, and that there would be…” She looked up. “Space for something else. Something on the side of it.”
“There is not,” James replied.
“I can see that.” She fixed him with a slightly rueful look. “You know, you look different, Your Grace,” she said. “Different than you did in London in the spring.”
“Do I?”
She nodded. “You look… settled, which I would not have predicted.” A pause. “Marriage has changed you more than anyone expected.”
“More thanIexpected,” he emphasized.
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she stood, with the grace that was simply part of how she moved, and retrieved her cloak from the chair where she had draped it with the decisive movements of someone concluding a chapter they had opened.
“I hope she knows,” she said at the door. “What she has… I hope she knows.”
He did not answer.
She bowed and left.
Fenwick appeared from wherever he had been and saw her out with seamless discretion.
