“You approached me because I was the nearest woman in the room who could credibly be described as an acquaintance.” She arched a brow. “Am I wrong?”
A pause that lasted precisely one beat too long.
“Lady Pembley,” he said, his voice slightly lower, “has spent the entire evening engineering situations in which her daughter and I are briefly and unavoidably alone together, and it has been working so far. I mean, we’re friends, but that is how far I can take it.”
“How terrible for you both.”
“Isadora.” It came out quiet.
She looked at him. He looked back, something slightly more honest in his expression now that the performance had slipped.
“Yes,” she said, laughter threatening to slip out. “I thought as much.”
He exhaled. “If you laugh at me, I will never forgive you.”
“I am not laughing at you. I am quietly appreciating the situation, which is entirely different.” She looked toward Lady Pembley and her daughter again, whose progress was slowed by the necessity of appearing not to be making progress. “She is very persistent.”
“She is relentless,” he muttered. “She has been relentless since February.”
“Perhaps,” Isadora said, biting the inside of her cheek, “society has finally decided that even James Harcliffe must marry eventually.”
James looked pained. “Society can mind its own affairs.”
“Society has no affairs other than other people’s. That is rather its defining characteristic.”
She glanced back toward Caroline, who was now perhaps thirty feet away and closing the distance with steady patience. She really was extraordinarily pretty.
“She is very beautiful, at least.” She said it lightly, in the tone of someone noting an unremarkable truth.
James followed her gaze.
“She is,” he said easily.
She found herself looking at him as he looked at Caroline, and his expression was as honest as his reply.
The word settled somewhere it had no business settling. Isadora kept her expression precisely as it was—composed and faintlyamused—and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He had agreed with an observation she had made. That was all.
The orchestra eased into a waltz, and the dancers moved into formation around them.
Isadora decided that standing still in the middle of a ballroom while a waltz played was its own kind of conspicuous.
“You should dance,” she said quickly.
“I should do a great many things.” James glanced again toward the Pembleys, now caught temporarily in conversation with an elderly earl who had materialized somewhere to Lady Pembley’s left. “Most of them I have no intention of doing.”
“Careful. That almost sounds like a principle.”
“Do not tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain.” He winked.
She opened her mouth to give a ready response, something dry and precise, when a figure appeared at James’s elbow. A footman, moving with deliberate quiet as though he had been instructed to be discreet.
“Forgive me, My Lord.” He inclined his head toward James. “A gentleman has just arrived and is asking to speak with you. He says the matter cannot wait until morning.”
The shift was immediate. James’s shoulders stiffened a fraction, the easy amusement on his face rearranging itself into curious seriousness.
“Where?” he asked.
“The front hall, My Lord. He would not come further.”
