“That one.” Nancy gestured at him, sharply. “Like you are a sculpture carved from ice. Like nothing in the world could ever reach you.”
He laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “I have never been good at warmth.”
Nancy stared at him, the urge to do something—anything—building in her until it was a living thing.
She reached out, and before she could think twice, her fingers brushed his mouth. Just the corner, where the smile was, or should have been. The skin was warm and softer than she’d expected.
Oscar went utterly still. His eyes widened, blue and brilliant and full of unspoken questions.
Nancy froze. What in God’s name had she done? She whipped her hand back as if burned, and the color flared up her cheeks so fast she thought she might actually faint.
“I—” she started, but nothing came out.
Oscar didn’t move. He simply looked at her, as if she’d performed a magic trick and then forgotten how she’d done it.
Nancy lurched to her feet, nearly upsetting the table. “I must go,” she said, her voice high and strangled. “It’s late.”
“Nancy—” Oscar started, but she was already backing toward the door, one hand pressed to her chest to keep her heart from exploding.
“Good night,” she said, and fled the room, skirts snapping behind her like a flag of surrender.
She made it halfway to the stairs before her legs gave out and she had to sit, breathing in ragged gasps.
What had come over her? She’d let him make her lose that control. Again.
You are not a coward, Nancy,she told herself.
But it was a lie. Because she knew, with terrifying clarity, that she wanted him to touch her back. And she was not sure what would happen when he did.
CHAPTER 17
“Iwill have the pearls,” Nancy decided, watching her reflection in the dressing table’s mirror. “The emerald ones make my throat look like it’s trying to declare independence from the rest of me.”
Miss Lynch, her newly appropriated maid and still visibly terrified of the household, held both necklaces in her hands as steady as a windvane in a gale. “The pearls are more refined, Your Grace.”
Nancy wrinkled her nose at the title, though it was already settling into her skin like an inconvenient rash. “It’s only dinner, Miss Lynch. I’m not being presented at Court.”
The maid said nothing, only fastened the pearls with the nimble, reverent touch of someone who had probably never handled anything so expensive in her life.
Nancy examined her dress in the glass. The red was, by all accounts, the correct shade for her hair and complexion. Her mother would have approved. Even her father, who thought all colors a waste of time unless attached to a thoroughbred, might have paused to remark on the cut.
She should have felt powerful, or at least composed. Instead, her nerves fluttered like moths in her stomach. Ever since the debacle of the previous night—her touch, his mouth, the look on Oscar’s face when she had done it—she’d avoided her husband as much as possible. She busied herself with the perfect excuse: preparing to host Lord Eastmere for dinner.
Eastmere was an old friend of Scarfield’s. A rake, or so the papers claimed, but a harmless one. Nancy had met him once at a garden party and remembered only that he had a laugh that carried three counties and a taste for scandal that would mortify a Parisian.
She breathed out and squared her shoulders. “Thank you, Miss Lynch. That will be all.”
The maid bobbed a nervous curtsy and scampered out.
Nancy stared at herself in the mirror, daring her reflection to betray her. “You can do this,” she muttered, which seemed an absurd thing to say about eating soup and enduring small talk, but there it was.
She descended the stairs with the measured dignity of a woman being led to her fate, and at the bottom found Oscar waiting inthe drawing room. He was, as ever, unreadable. The blue of his coat matched his mood, and he regarded her as if she were a particularly difficult puzzle.
Nancy stopped on the last step. “Do I have something on my face?”
He took her in—head to toe, in a survey that was not entirely clinical—and grinned. “Only an expression of impending doom. Is it the prospect of dinner, or the company?”
She smothered a smile. “I have endured both before. I am simply bracing myself for Eastmere’s arrival.”
