Lord and Lady Westmere stood before them, recently returned to town after some weeks in the country. Cassian Westmere was dark, composed, and watchful, while his wife, Isabella, stood beside him in deep rose silk, her beauty softened by warmth and a cleverness in her eyes that missed very little.
“Your Grace,” Isabella said, taking Emmeline’s hand. “I have heard such lovely things.”
“Then you have been speaking to unusually generous people,” Emmeline replied.
Isabella laughed. “I always try to, though London does make it difficult.”
Cassian inclined his head to Rowan. “Ironford.”
“Westmere.”
There was a pause.
Emmeline glanced between them. “Is this a conversation?”
Cassian’s mouth barely moved. “For us, yes.”
Isabella sighed. “They are very proud of how little they can say.”
Rowan looked at Cassian. “Efficient.”
“Exactly,” Cassian replied.
Emmeline and Isabella exchanged a look and, without needing to know one another well, seemed to reach a complete understanding.
Later, as the music began in the adjoining room and the card tables rearranged themselves into clusters of gossip, Isabella walked beside Emmeline near the windows. Rowan watched from across the room, pretending to listen to Cassian discuss a bill before Parliament.
“You watch your wife very closely,” Cassian said.
Rowan’s gaze did not move. “Do I?”
“Yes.”
“You are mistaken.”
“I am rarely mistaken when the matter is obvious.”
Rowan looked at him then.
Cassian’s expression did not change. “It is a compliment, if clumsily made.”
“I did not ask for one.”
“No. Men like us rarely do.”
Rowan studied him for a long moment. There was something in Westmere’s tone that suggested recognition, of what it meant to stand apart from the room and still be undone by one woman’s turn of head.
Rowan looked back at Emmeline.
She was speaking with Isabella now, her face animated, her hands moving slightly as she described something. Candlelight caught the sandy softness of her hair, the curve of her mouth, the quiet strength in the way she held herself among people who had tried to make her feel uncertain of her place.
Rowan felt it like a hand to the chest.
Cassian followed his gaze. “Dangerous, is it not?”
Rowan said nothing.
Cassian’s mouth curved faintly. “Yes. I thought so.”
