Chapter Eight
The final chords of the last performance still lingered faintly in the air as the audience began to stir, the low rustle of silk and murmured conversation gradually replacing the measured stillness of polite attention.
As guests rose from their seats and filtered into smaller groups, the atmosphere shifted, becoming eager and expectant. The evening had resumed its more natural rhythm. Smiles were reapplied, champagne glasses refilled, alliances carefully tended in the flickering candlelight.
Arthur Beaumont remained seated a moment longer than the rest, his hands clasped loosely in his lap. He stared at the stage where Miss Abigail Darlington had performed with such poise and precision, though he suspected—no, he knew—it had cost her far more than it appeared.
His mother, Lady Gillian Beaumont, had already risen and was speaking animatedly to another matron nearby, her eyes scanning the crowd for suitable prospects. Arthur could see her calculating gaze sweep across the room like a general surveying a battlefield. He knew what was coming. She’d planned this evening with precision, and he would be expected to follow through. It had always been this way.
He stood slowly, smoothing the lapels of his coat as he prepared himself for the inevitable parade of introductions.
Within moments, Lady Gillian reappeared at his side with the well-practiced smile of a woman confident her offspring was about to be presented with the most dazzling of options. “Arthur,” she said with a slight tilt of her head, “allow me to introduce you to Miss Millicent Greystone. Her family owns the Greystone estate in Surrey—lovely countryside, you recall—and she is recently returned from a Season in Bath.”
Miss Greystone, a girl with honey-colored curls and an uncertain smile, curtsied prettily. She was perhaps nine and ten, maybe twenty at the most, with delicate features and wide, expectant eyes. Arthur bowed politely and began the conversation he had endured a dozen times already that Season.
—Indeed, the weather had been unusually fine.
—No, he hadn’t yet made plans for the summer.
—Yes, the musical program this evening had been quite enjoyable.
—Indeed, Miss Greystone played the harp. Her mother insisted it was an invaluable talent for any well-bred lady.
As she prattled on, he found his gaze wandering. He located Abigail again almost instinctively. She stood near her mother and Lord Edward Colton, the latter of whom was monopolizing the space between them with an unrelenting display of flattery and no concept of personal space.
Colton was leaning far too close, his expression more possessive than admiring, and Arthur saw the way Abigail subtly leaned away from him, her smile thinned to its most practiced form.
He was speaking with great animation—gesturing far too grandly, smiling too broadly, and leaning far too close. His posture, Arthur noted with narrowed eyes, was not the idle slouch of a gentleman in light conversation, but the forward encroachment of a man used to taking liberties he believed would go unchallenged. There was something almost proprietary in the angle of his stance, in the way his gloved hand brushed the air near Abigail’s wrist, as though testing the boundaries of decorum and assuming they would yield.
Arthur’s jaw tensed.
Colton had always struck him as the sort of man who cultivated charm as a smokescreen for entitlement. Polished enough to gain entrance anywhere, but with little beneath the surface beyond self-interest and practiced pleasantries. He was the type who mistook persistence for appeal and assumed the absence of rejection was tantamount to consent.
And Abigail—Abigail, who had stood so fearlessly before a room full of people only an hour ago—was now offering him a smile so precisely measured it might have been drawn with a ruler. There was no warmth in it, only the semblance of civility.
Arthur saw the way she leaned slightly away from Colton, the subtle shift of her weight toward her mother. It was a retreat disguised as poise, the same technique Eliza had once employed at the height of her first Season, when cornered by a Viscount with breath that smelled of pickled walnuts.
Arthur’s fingers curled into a fist at his side.
He had no right to intervene. No claim, no promise. Abigail was not his to guard.
And yet, a dark, unwelcome heat rose in his chest. He knew jealousy when it came for lesser men—but he had never expected it to come forhim. Not like this. Not over her.
He reminded himself that Colton had done nothing wrong—nothing anyone else would find objectionable, at least not aloud. His flattery was effusive, indeed, and his presence overbearing, but such behavior was well within the bounds of what society deemed acceptable courtship.
Any protest Arthur might make would be seen as possessiveness, or worse—rivalry. A rivalry he had no intention of declaring, even if it burned behind his ribcage with unwelcome intensity.
Still, his gaze remained fixed.
Not on Colton, but on her.
Abigail, who continued to endure the man’s attentions with all the grace of a diplomat weathering a tedious alliance. Abigail, whose dignity held under the strain of proximity she had clearly not invited.
Arthur saw it all.
And in seeing, he understood something uncomfortably clear. If he did not act—if he allowed others to crowd the space he had too long left vacant—then the loss would be his to bear, and his alone.
But still he stood rooted, silent, watching her from across the room.
