Page 65 of The Luckiest Lady in London

“I do.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to tell that you were related to your father.”

Instantly she regretted her statement. Before her London Season, Lady Balfour had given her an important piece of advice: Never comment on likeness or the lack thereof. With marriage what it was among the upper crust, there was no telling who might have fathered a lady’s third or fourth or fifth child.

But he was the firstborn, the heir.

“I am my predecessor’s son,” he said calmly.

“Of course you are. I only meant to say that the resemblance is slight.”

There was a beat of silence. He tilted his chin at the telescope. “It’s Io, by the way.”

It took her a moment to understand that he was talking about the moon that cast a shadow on Jupiter. She examined the image in the telescope again. “Because it’s the closest to Jupiter?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any formal training in astronomy?”

“No, but I did read mathematics and physics at university.”

He had been at Cambridge; that she knew. But she drew a blank when she tried to come up with the name of the public school he must have attended. “And before university, you were at…”

“Here. I was tutored at home.”

He had so many friends, she’d assumed that they must have been accumulated from his days as a pupil. She couldn’t imagine someone who enjoyed the company of others as much as he being stuck home, with no other children nearby for playmates.

“Why? I thought you said you did not suffer from any illnesses.”

“My mother preferred to keep me at Huntington.”

She almost asked, Was she very attached to you? But the measured, neutral tone with which he’d spoken of his parents did not convey any particular closeness.

“I see,” she said instead, fiddling with the knobs. “By the way, are there any other eyepieces? And would you mind explaining to me the best ways of using them?”

* * *

This was the peril of being close to another person: One became seen for what one was.

Felix preferred to view his biography as beginning with the day he inherited his title, when his sleek new persona was first forged.

In this, he was greatly helped by the facade of devotion his mother presented in public—of course the son of a woman who so genuinely adored him would embody all the virtues of manhood. He was also greatly helped by the fact that most people preferred to take one another at face value—a well-turned-out chap of pedigree, manners, and hospitality must be just that, the epitome of gentlemanliness.

He’d always known he was nothing of the sort. As did Louisa. But it was one thing to let her see the flaws that he in fact considered strengths—cunning, unscrupulousness, a willingness to break rules—quite another to expose his actual weaknesses, the old pains and yearnings that had never completely dissipated into the ether.

To allow her access to the one soft spot on the dragon’s underbelly that no fire or adamantine scales could protect.

* * *

The eastern sky was turning paler when they stowed the telescope and came back inside.

“Did you already know that I get up in the middle of the night to use the telescope?” she asked, as they passed into her bedroom.

“I’ve seen you.”

On those occasions Lady Tremaine had caught him coming back into the house at odd hours, he had been on the grounds, standing in the shadows, gazing up at his wife’s balcony, and her solitary figure at the telescope.

She hopped onto the bed and sat at its edge, leaning forward slightly, her elbows on her knees, her interlinked fingers beneath her chin.