“I disapprove of anything too evidently contrived,” he shrugged.
“Oh, but that seems like a dangerous principle to hold in London,” she replied playfully.
“I know.”
“And yet here you are,” she couldn’t help but smile through her answer.
“And yet here I am,” he sighed, although he, too, was smiling.
She glanced once more toward the ladies he had escaped. “Your parrot women will be very much disappointed.”
“I have already disappointed half the room. The rest, I believe, are waiting their turn.”
Aurelia nodded. “Then you are much in demand.”
“I don’t really believe it’s a recommendation,” he confessed.
“No?”
“No. It only proves that fortune and a title are more engaging than personality.”
She looked at him sidelong. “That sounds suspiciously like self-knowledge.”
“It is merely observation.”
“On society?”
“On everything.”
There was something in the way he said it that altered the lightness of the exchange, though only a little. Aurelia felt again that curious sense she had experienced the previous evening, that for all his composure, there was something deeper in him than his surroundings accounted for. There was a darkness to him, symbolizing that he knew the world was not made only of drawing rooms and polished speeches.
He did not belong wholly to such places, though he could move through them with ease when required.
It made her look at him more carefully, only for him to gaze back at her.
“And what have you observed of London since your return, Miss Finch?”
The question ought to have been harmless. In another mouth it would have been harmless, just a convenient subject to carry them over the next few minutes. Yet something in his tone made her suspect he meant more than that. He knew her name now. He knew enough, surely, to know what it had once cost her family to be known in this city.
Aurelia gave the faintest lift of one shoulder. “I have not been in town long enough to judge it fairly.”
“Even so.”
He did not let the matter go. There was no cruelty in it, but neither was there the timid avoidance she had grown used to. Most people, if they remembered the scandal at all, preferred to pretend they did not. They would speak to her with exaggerated civility, then turn away and discuss it where she could not answer. It was strange and almost relieving to be asked in a more direct manner.
“You ask very plain questions, Lord Westbridge.”
“I would rather ask plainly than leave you to guess what I mean.”
The answer surprised her into a slight smile. “That is uncommon.”
“Is it unwelcome?” he inquired almost tenderly.
“No,” she said and found that she meant it. “Only … unusual.”
He waited.
The quiet patience of it made refusal seem sillier than honesty, at least in part. Aurelia looked down briefly at the wine in her glass.
