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“Then you were not looking closely enough.” His eyebrows furrowed. “That was probably a ruse to get your attention.”

Leonora, glancing down at the hand still resting at her waist, found she did not mind the feeling of it much at all, though she suspected she ought to say something about the presumption of it regardless.

“You are still touching me, Anthony,” she said instead.

“Am I?”

“You are.”

He did not remove his hand, and she found, rather inconveniently, that she was not entirely sorry about that either.

“You mean to keep it there for the remainder of the evening, then?” she said.

“I had not decided.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “It is not.” He did not elaborate further, and she did not press him, aware that pressing would mean admitting she had noticed the hand at all, which felt, just now, like admitting it had an effect on her.

“Where is Her Grace?” Leonora asked, suddenly recalling that they had come to this ball with someone else entirely, someone she had rather lost track of in the last quarter hour.

“A fair question.” Anthony glanced about the crowded room, a faint line of concern crossing his features. “Let us go and find her, before she manages to get herself into any particular trouble.”

They had not gone far before a peal of laughter rose above the general noise of the ballroom, unmistakably Marian’s, bright and considerably too delighted for whatever had produced it. Leonora exchanged a glance with Anthony, and from the look on his face, she gathered he recognized the sound for the warning it was every bit as well as she did.

They found Marian near the refreshment table a few minutes later, and it took Leonora only a moment to understand why the dowager duchess was laughing rather more loudly than the joke, whatever it had been, seemed to warrant.

“Grandmother,” Anthony said, drawing her a step aside while Leonora hovered close enough to hear. “Have you been drinking the ratafia?”

“I have been drinking several glasses of the ratafia, it is delightful, and you ought to try some instead of scowling at everyone within ten feet of you.” Marian patted his arm affectionately. “I was just telling Lady Ainsworth what a fine match you have made. She was very impressed. I believe I may have mentioned the wedding.”

“You did what, Grandmother?” he asked.

“Your Grace.” A gentleman Leonora did not recognize appeared at Anthony’s elbow, beaming, a glass raised half in salute. “I believe congratulations are in order. Word has only just reached me, but I could not let the evening pass without offering my felicitations. A fine match indeed, and long overdue, if I may say so.”

“You may say whatever you like,” Anthony said, with a civility so precisely correct that it felt colder than open temper would have. “Thank you.”

The gentleman moved on, well pleased with himself, already turning to share the news with someone else across the room, and Leonora watched Anthony’s face in the moment after he had gone. The pleasant mask had not slipped, not quite, but something beneath it had gone very still and very hard, a tightness at his jaw and a flatness behind his eyes that she had not seen from him before, not even at his most irritated with her, not even that first night outside the auction house.

She had seen him amused. She had seen him exasperated, and cutting, and once or twice something close to tender, though he would have denied it if asked. She had never once seen him properly angry, and looking at him now, she understood clearly that this was what it looked like, banked low and carefully contained behind good manners for the sake of the room around them.

“Anthony,” she said quietly, under the noise of the crowd.

He did not answer at once, his eyes still fixed on some point across the ballroom, and Leonora found she already knew, without needing him to say it, that whatever came next once they were away from all these watching faces would not be settled gently, and would not be settled quickly either.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Iasked you one thing, Grandmother. One thing.”

“You asked me to say nothing until you had chosen your own moment, and I have already told you, I did agree to that, and then it simply slipped my mind. Marian sat across from him in the carriage, entirely unrepentant, her hands folded neatly in her lap as though the whole matter were beneath her notice. “There is a considerable difference between the two, Anthony, whatever you would like to believe.”

“There is no difference at all, and you know it.”

The carriage rattled on through the streets, and Anthony stared out the window rather than at his grandmother, because looking at her just now would not improve his temper in the slightest. He was angry. He had not been properly angry in longer than he cared to remember, and the unfamiliarity of it sat badly in his chest, sharp, hot and entirely too large for the small space of the carriage.

It was not, he told himself, that the whole of London now believed he was engaged. That had always been a risk of this arrangement, an outcome he had weighed and accepted before he had ever brought Leonora into his grandmother’s rooms full of cats. It was not even, strictly, the timing of it, though the timing could not have been worse. He had a shipment stalled at Bristol, a decision William was waiting on regarding the venture, tenant accounts that wanted his attention and had wanted it for a fortnight, and now, on top of all of it, an engagement the entire ton believed was real, which meant a wedding the entire ton would eventually expect, which meant explaining, eventually, why there would be no wedding at all.

That was not truly it either.