“I know you were at the Asquiths. I know there is a conservatory. Tell me what happened in it.”
Imogen told her. Not everything. Not the hand on the trousers, not the specific heat of him against her palm, not the trembling. Not the hour she had spent afterwards lying in the dark with her thighs pressed together and his voice in her head. She told her about the conservatory, the kiss, the words he had said and the honesty in his voice. She watched Bethany’s face change as she listened, the protective sharpness softening into something that looked less like certainty and more like worry, the kind of worry that came from recognizing that the situation had moved past the point where good advice could help.
“He told me to tell him to go,” Imogen said. “He said he would leave and not return. He meant it, Bethany. I am certain he meant it.”
“That is precisely what concerns me.” Bethany set her cup down. “A rake who does not mean it is a nuisance. A rake who means it is something else entirely, because meaning it does not change what he is. It only changes how much damage he does when he leaves.”
“You assume he will leave.”
“No rake has ever told the truth about wanting a woman who was not paying him for the privilege,” Bethany said, and her voice was quieter than usual, as if the volume of it mattered, as if speaking softly might cushion the landing. “I have watched them, Imogen. I have watched them for six seasons. They say what is needed and they mean it while they say it and then they leave, and the women they leave behind are the ones who believed the meaning would last.”
Imogen did not argue, but she did not agree either.
They finished their chocolate in silence. Bethany kissed her cheek at the door but paused, her hand on the latch, and said, very quietly, “I hope I am wrong about him, Imogen. I have never hoped that before about any man. I want you to know that.”
The latch clicked. Imogen sat alone in the morning room for a long time, her hands wrapped around a cup that had gone cold, and the memory of his body against her palm still vivid. She thought about hope, and about how dangerous it was to want a man you had been warned against, and about how the warning made the wanting worse. How none of that mattered, because her hand still remembered the shape of him, her body still remembered the heat, and she was past the point where warnings could help.
Chapter Seven
“The figure stands at three-eighths of the way to the deadline, Ravenhurst. I expect detail.”
Devlin was leaning against the wall of the Asquith side hall with a glass of port in one hand and the particular expression he wore when he was enjoying himself at someone else’s expense; a smile that sat on the surface of his face without reaching anything underneath it. The side hall was narrow, lit by a single wall sconce. From the half-open door to the main corridor came the muffled hum of the dinner gathering, voices and laughter spilling faintly into the quiet. Ash was trying to reach the front entrance unnoticed. Being seen would mean conversation, and conversation would demand composure, which was a quality he had abandoned in the conservatory some twelve minutes earlier, along with any ability to think about anything other than the lingering warmth of Imogen Goodall’s hand against him.
“The wager is progressing,” Ash said. His voice came out flat and uninflected, which was the only safe register available to him, because the alternative was the register in which his voice had said feel what you do to me, and that register was not for Devlin’s ears and never would be.
“Progressing.” Devlin swirled his port. “That is not detail, Ravenhurst. That is a report from a man who has nothing to report, or a man who has a great deal to report and would prefer not to. Which are you?”
Ash should have walked past him. He should have said good evening and continued down the corridor and left the Asquith manor. He should have gone home and not spoken to anyone until his body had stopped thrumming and his mind had stopped replaying the sound she had made when his hand foundher breast, the small gasp that had gone through him like a wire pulled taut.
He did not walk past. He was still half-undone from the conservatory, his mind scattered, the taste of her still on his lips, and Devlin’s question landed on him at the worst possible moment, when his defenses were down and his rehearsed indifference was nowhere to be found.
“The lady has surprised me,” Ash said, and walked past Devlin without explaining what he meant, because what he meant was that Imogen Goodall had rearranged something inside him that he did not have language for and was not prepared to discuss with a man whose smile did not reach his eyes.
He heard Devlin set his glass on the hall table. A faint note of amusement followed and then something quieter, darker. Ash didn’t turn because he already knew Devlin’s look.
He had just told Devlin, without intending to, that the spinster was more than a wallflower, and that the Duke of Ravenhurst was not behaving as the wager demanded, and Devlin, who missed nothing and forgave less, had filed it.
The front door closed behind him. The night air was cold, and he stood on the Asquith steps for a long time, his hands in his pockets, the watch in his waistcoat ticking against his ribs, and tried to locate the part of himself that had walked into the conservatory intending to advance a wager and had walked out of it no longer certain the wager existed.
He could not find it. That part of himself appeared to have been replaced by a man who was standing on the Asquith steps in the dark with his lips swollen, his member still half-hard in his breeches, and the ghost of her hand printed against him like a brand. The man who was standing there was not the Duke of Ravenhurst the ton had known for eight years. The man standing there was someone he did not yet recognize, and thatwas the most unsettling thing that had happened to him all evening.
He went home, but he could not sleep.
***
He arrived at Henry Frost’s lodgings at ten, which was an unreasonable hour by most standards. But Frost kept unreasonable hours. As a viscount’s second son, he’d been given modest means and expectations, and had filled both with coffee and good sense instead of brandy and poor choices. Frost’s rooms were in a decent set of chambers on the second floor of a building on Jermyn Street, comfortably furnished, the bookshelves full, the coffee pot always warm, the general atmosphere that of a man who had decided to be civilized and was willing to do the work required.
Frost opened the door himself. He was in shirtsleeves, his hair still damp from the basin, a cup of coffee in his left hand. He looked at Ash, who he could see had not slept, and stepped back without comment to let him in.
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
The coffee was hot and strong and tasted of nothing, because everything tasted of nothing when you had not slept, and your body was still running on the fumes of a conservatory encounter that had ended twelve hours ago and had not, by any measurable standard, ended at all. Ash sat in the chair by the window and drank it but did not explain why he was there. He did not even know why he was there, except that Frost’s rooms were the only place in London where he could sit without performing and the not-performing was the thing he needed more than coffee.
Frost sat across from him, poured his own cup and waited. He was very good at waiting, better than any man Ash had ever known, because he did not fill silences with noise as the rest ofthe wager set did. Frost let silences exist because he understood that silence was where most people kept the things they were not ready to say, and pressuring a man to speak before he was ready was the surest way to get a lie instead of the truth.
The silence lasted four minutes. Ash counted them on the mantel clock because counting was easier than thinking.
