“Emmeline.”
She closed her eyes.
Her name in his mouth had nearly ruined her on the dance floor. It had almost sounded like an apology then. Like a confession. Like something large and impossible had risen inside him before he stepped back, bowed, and left her standing there with his touch still burning through her gown.
He had left and Amanda had noticed. Everyone had noticed.
She drew a breath through her nose and opened her eyes to the dark garden below. “Return to the ballroom, Your Grace. I would not wish to keep you from Lord Ainsbury.”
He said nothing for a moment.
Then his boots sounded once against the stone as he stepped closer. “What did she say?”
Emmeline’s fingers tightened around the railing. “Who?”
“Do not insult me.”
A bitter little laugh left her before she could stop it. “How unfair. I thought insults were permitted between us, provided one looked sufficiently wounded afterward.”
His face remained carefully neutral, but his fingers tightened once around his gloves, the leather creaking softly in his fist.
“Lady Amanda,” he said, each syllable controlled. “What did she say to you?”
Emmeline swallowed. She would not give him the satisfaction of hearing it. She would not become pitiful before him.
“It does not matter.”
He moved closer again.
She felt him now through the bare strip of night between them. Felt it at her shoulders, along her spine, at the back of her neck where the pinned curls left her skin exposed. Her body wanted to lean backward by the smallest degree, to test whether he was close enough to catch her. She remained rigid instead.
“She upset you,” he said.
Emmeline turned at last.
He stood only a few feet away, dark against the spill of ballroom light, his gray eyes fixed on her with such intensity that her breath vanished. His jaw was hard, his shoulders tense beneath his evening coat, his gloves held in one hand as if he had torn them off without knowing he had done it.
He looked furious. And because some foolish, wounded part of her still wanted that fury to be for her, the sight made everything worse.
“She observed me,” Emmeline said. “That is all.”
His eyes narrowed. “What did she observe?”
She lifted her chin. “That my husband is determined to avoid me.”
Rowan went still. His hand closed slowly around his gloves. “She said that to you?”
“She said people notice these things.” Emmeline’s mouth curved, though nothing in her felt amused. “Apparently, your distance is not as private as you imagined.”
His eyes darkened. “What else?”
“She mentioned ghosts,” Emmeline said, more quietly now, and hated the small break in her voice. “She implied that a second wife must learn to contend with them.”
For one heartbeat, his face lost every trace of restraint.
The change was so swift and savage that her breath caught. His gaze cut toward the ballroom doors as though he meant to walk back inside, cross the room, and reduce Amanda to ash before the entire ton.
“She will never speak to you like that again,” he said, the words almost a growl. “Not while I draw breath.”
