“I am not.” Her voice was level. Her hand in her lap was now perfectly still.
“Your hand, Miss Goodall.”
“My hand is my own, Your Grace. As I have told you before.”
He almost smiled. Almost, because smiling would have meant breaking the look on his face that he was using to keep everything else on his face from showing, and what was threatening to show was something he was not ready for three hundred people to see. He poured himself champagne instead, and drank it, but tasted nothing.
They said very little during dinner. He asked her once whether the chicken was acceptable. She told him it was, but the company was variable; the same word she had used at the morning call, and the repetition of it, the small private callback to a conversation only the two of them remembered, landed somewhere behind his breastbone, settled there and refused to move.
Bethany Mercer appeared at Imogen’s elbow as the supper plates were being cleared. She had been watching from across the room for the past forty minutes. Ash had noticed her, a still dark-haired figure at a corner table, her teacup untouched, her eyes moving between Imogen and Ash, steady, focused, cataloguing evidence for a case she intended to argue later. Forty minutes had apparently been long enough, because she was here now, taking Imogen’s arm through hers and drawing her gently away from the table without looking at Ash.
He watched them go. Bethany’s back was straight, her grip on Imogen’s arm firm, protective, and she leaned close to Imogen’s ear as they walked and said something he could not hear but could guess the shape of. Because Bethany Mercer’s face had not carried a smile all evening and the absence of it was its own sentence. Something about dukes. Something about danger. Something about how the entire ballroom was now revising its summer plans and how that revision was not necessarily kind.
Imogen did not answer whatever Bethany had said. He could see her profile as they walked toward the supper room door; her face was very still, her eyes were very bright, and she was walking carefully, as if the floor beneath her were not entirely where she expected it to be. As if the waltz were still happening somewhere inside her body and had not yet finished its final turn.
He sat alone at the supper table with a glass of champagne he did not drink, the ghost of her waist beneath his palm and a realisation that was settling into him, slow and inexorable and impossible to unfeel. He had come to this ball to advance a wager. He had asked for the supper waltz because the wager required visibility. He had held her in front of three hundred people because the wager demanded public courtship.
None of that was true. Not one word of it. He had asked for the waltz because he wanted to hold her. He had held her because holding her was the only honest thing he had done in eight years. And the wager, the five thousand, the chestnut and Devlin’s smile at Aurelie’s, was sitting in his memory like a piece of broken glass he had swallowed and was only now beginning to feel cut.
The champagne glass was still in his hand. He set it down. Around him, the dinner room was thinning, couples returning to the ballroom for the final dances, chairs scraping, conversation rising and falling in the particular rhythm of people who had been sitting down for too long and were ready to stand. A footman approached to clear his plate, hesitated when he saw the duke’s face, and retreated without clearing anything.
He thought about Devlin. Devlin would want a report. He had been sending small enquiring notes for the past week, worded casually, friendly on the surface, each one containing a reference to the deadline or the chestnut or some detail of the wager’s terms that was designed to remind Ash that the gamehad scores and that scores required keeping. He had answered one of them, three days ago. A single line:Progressing.He had signed it with his initial, sealed it and sent it. He sat in his study for ten minutes afterwards, turning the watch over in his hands and thinking about the distance between what the letter said and what was true.
He finished the champagne and left the Hartwood ball without speaking to anyone else. His cravat was still badly done, his gloves still carrying the warmth of her hand, the watch ticking in his waistcoat pocket, keeping time against a body that had decided that it was no longer interested in being managed, and a mind that was beginning, very slowly and very reluctantly, to agree.
The carriage was waiting at the kerb. Collins had sent it ahead, because Collins anticipated things, and tonight what Collins had anticipated was that the Duke of Ravenhurst would leave the Hartwood ball earlier than expected and in a state that did not invite conversation. The streets were quiet, and the watch ticked in his pocket. In the dark of the carriage, he took it out and held it but did not open it. He did not need to see his mother’s face tonight. He already knew what she would have said.
She would have said that a man who waltzes with a woman he has been hired to ruin has forfeited the right to call it a wager.
She would have been right.
Chapter Six
“You look flushed, my dear. Perhaps the claret.”
Aunt Margery said it innocently, genuinely convinced that claret was responsible for the color in her niece’s cheeks, and Imogen let her believe it, because the alternative explanation involved a duke who was seated four places down the Asquith dinner table and who had spent the past hour and a half looking at Imogen with an attention that the claret could not possibly account for.
“Perhaps,” Imogen said. “I think I will step out for air.”
She rose from the table carefully, composing herself, aware of her own body in a manner she very much wished she were not. The dining room was too warm. Forty people in a room designed for thirty, the candles on the table and the claret were adding to the warmth. The Duke of Ravenhurst, four places down and on the opposite side, was making it even worse, even though his contribution was less thermal and more persistent.
She excused herself to Aunt Margery, who nodded vaguely and returned to a conversation about the price of muslin with the woman on her left. She excused herself to Cassie, who was deep in discussion with Miss Drayton about a bonnet they had both seen in a shop window on Bond Street and which one of them had a better claim to. Nobody noticed Imogen leave the table, because nobody ever noticed Imogen. Tonight the invisibility was a gift, because tonight she needed to be alone with the heat in her body, the memory of the corridor and the growing, terrifying suspicion that she was not going to be able to stop wanting the Duke of Ravenhurst no matter how many sensible voices told her to try.
She had been trying not to look at him. She had been trying since the first course, when she had made the mistake ofglancing down the table and had found his pale eyes already on her, steady and unhurried. The look had lasted three full seconds before she had broken the contact and returned her attention to her turbot with a concentration that the turbot did not deserve. But the eyes kept coming back. Every time she raised her own gaze from the plate, he was there, watching her from between the candelabra with an expression that was not exactly desire and not exactly amusement but was, if she was reading it accurately, something closer to patience, the particular patience of a man who knew where the evening was going and was content to wait for it to arrive.
The Asquith manor was a sprawling country house on the western edge of London, the sort of property that wealthy families kept for entertaining when the season became too hot, too crowded and too expensive to manage within the city proper. The dinner had been forty people in a room designed for thirty, the candles too many, the courses too rich, and the conversation pitched at the particular frequency that polite society adopted when everyone in the room had something to say. Imogen had eaten very little. She had drunk two glasses of claret, which was one more than her usual; the second glass had been a mistake, because the second glass had made her brave enough to look back at Ash across the table, and looking back at him had made her aware, again, of everything she had been trying not to be aware of since the corridor at the Montford.
She could remember the fact that she had bitten his lip, which continued to astonish her three days later, because Imogen Goodall did not bite men’s lips in dark corridors, or at least she had not done so before last Tuesday. The version of herself who had done it was a version she was still getting acquainted with and was not entirely certain she trusted.
She slipped away from the table while the dessert was being cleared and the gentlemen were beginning to arrangethemselves for the port. The corridor beyond the dining room led past the morning room and the small parlor and through a set of glass-panelled doors into the conservatory. The conservatory was where she went, because it was the only room in the Asquith manor that did not contain people, and people were the thing she needed a respite from, particularly one person. The person whose attention had been sitting on her skin all evening like a hand she could feel but could not see.
The conservatory was warm. Wet warm air, heavy with the scent of orange blossom and damp earth, the kind of heat that arrived through the glass roof during the day and lingered through the evening, trapped, thick and faintly tropical. The orange trees were arranged in pots along both walls, their leaves dark and glossy, their fruit small, unripe and fragrant. The lamplight was low, a single oil lamp on a table near the door and another at the far end beside a potting bench, and the space between them was all shadow, green and the soft drip of water from the pipes that fed the misting system along the glass.
Imogen stood among the orange trees and breathed. She closed her eyes and let the quiet settle around her and tried, very deliberately, to stop thinking about the Duke of Ravenhurst.
She did not succeed. She had not succeeded in three days, and she was not going to succeed now, standing alone in an orange-tree conservatory with the taste of claret on her lips and the memory of his thumb on her nipple still lodged in her body like a splinter she could not reach. The memory was physical. That was the problem. It was not a thought she could dismiss or an idea she could argue with. It was a sensation, specific, located and persistent, and it lived in the place beneath her stays where his hand had been and in the warmth between her legs where the corridor had left its mark. The claret had only made it worse, and she was beginning to understand, with a clarity she did notwelcome, that the books had been right about one thing at least. Desire, once started, did not stop on request.
“You left before the port.”
