Her eyes searched his face.
He offered his arm. “Shall we?”
She took it.
Only when they had crossed into the next room did she speak, voice low. “You cannot fight every woman who says something cruel to me.”
“I did not fight her.”
“You wounded her.”
“She will survive.”
“Rowan.”
He looked down at her. The candlelight caught the honey in her eyes, and he saw too much there. Gratitude. Concern. Something perilously close to tenderness.
“She hurt you,” he said simply.
Her breath changed.
“So I answered.”
For a moment, she said nothing. Then her hand tightened on his arm.
“That is not an apology,” she whispered.
“No. But it is right.”
She looked away before he could see too much of what that meant to her.
By the end of the week, the whispers had changed.
They did not vanish. London never gave up entirely on cruelty; it merely grew bored and found fresher blood. Foxdale’s name ceased appearing in every conversation like a knife set prettily beside a plate. Juliet became less scandal and more mystery. Wellfield’s humiliation became less urgent than a countess’s elopement, a marquess’s gaming debt, and a baron’s daughter rumored to have thrown wine at a poet.
And Emmeline, to Rowan’s grim satisfaction, began to be spoken of with more admiration than pity.
“She carries herself well,” he heard one matron say.
“Pretty creature,” said another.
“Not merely pretty,” a gentleman replied, and then saw Rowan across the room and remembered urgent business elsewhere.
Rowan smiled for the first time that evening.
“Did you just frighten that man by existing?” Emmeline murmured.
“I try not to waste my talents.”
Her laugh was quiet and warm.
He wanted to take her home at once. Instead, he stood beside her like a civilized husband and thought very uncivilized things about the curve of her wrist above her glove.
Then a woman’s amused voice cut gently through the space between them.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I would not interrupt, but I have been wanting to meet the new Duchess of Ironford all evening.”
Rowan turned.
