***
Dinner that evening was the first test.
The dining room at Ravenhurst Park was enormous, a long room with a vaulted ceiling and portraits of Hambridge ancestors arranged between the windows. The table had been set for twenty, which was the full complement of the house gathering, and the silverware and the flowers in lowarrangements down the center were all exactly correct. They were expensive and all arranged by someone who understood that a duke’s dinner table was a stage and the guests were both audience and performers.
Ash seated her beside himself, and the seating was improper, but the impropriety was deliberate, and every person at the table knew it. A duke seating an unmarried woman of no particular rank beside himself at his own table was a declaration, not an arrangement, and the declaration landed on the room and produced the particular quality of silence that arrived when polite society was thinking very loudly and saying nothing. Lady Asquith, across the table, raised one eyebrow a quarter of an inch. Lord Rourke, four seats down, glanced at Devlin. Devlin did not glance back. He was looking at his wine glass, turning it slowly between his fingers, and the gesture had a quality to it that suggested he was not thinking about wine.
Bethany was three seats down, beside a viscount’s wife whose name Imogen did not catch. Her eyes moved between Imogen and Ash throughout the first course, tracking the angle of his body toward Imogen’s, the frequency with which he refilled her wine glass, and his hand resting on the tablecloth near hers without touching it. It was close enough that the proximity was visible from three seats away and the not-touching was, to anyone who was paying attention, louder than touching would have been.
Imogen ate her soup, and then her fish. She participated in the conversation to her left, which was about the gardens and whether the Ravenhurst roses were superior to the Asquith roses, a subject on which she had no opinion and which she navigated by agreeing with whoever had spoken most recently. Her right side, the Ash side, was a different country entirely. She was aware of his sleeve near her arm, the heat of his body through the layers of their clothing, the low sound of his voicewhen he spoke to the man on his other side, a conversation about horses that she was not included in and did not need to be included in because the sound of his voice was, at this proximity, a physical thing. It was a vibration she could feel in her ribs, but the feeling was not unpleasant, and that was becoming a recurring problem.
He turned to her once during the meat course, his eyes finding hers at close range, and said, very quietly, so that only she could hear: “The blue suits you. I should have said so earlier.”
“You prepared a blue bedroom for me, Your Grace.”
“I did.”
“That is saying so, Your Grace. With considerable planning.”
He almost laughed, but she saw him stop his laugh and hide it. He looked at her with a mix of amusement and something warmer, and that warmth touched her face and stayed there.
She looked back down at her food and didn’t look at him again for the rest of the meal. If she did, she knew she would blush. And blushing at a ducal dinner table, in front of Lord Stormont, Bethany Mercer, and all the other guests, was not something she wanted.
Devlin spoke to her once during dessert. He was at the far end of the table, and the question carried across the conversation, pitched to arrive at her ears specifically, the way a man aimed a bullet at a target.
“Miss Goodall, I understand you are a great reader. Ravenhurst tells us you have opinions about novels.”
The table quieted slightly, but Imogen looked at him. His face was charming, his smile wide, his eyes absolutely still.
“I have opinions about most things. Novels are simply the ones I am most willing to share.”
He laughed. The laugh was short and polished but carried no warmth at all. Imogen turned back to her plate and did notlook at him again, but the cold thread she had first noticed at the Montford tightened slightly in her stomach and stayed there for the rest of the meal.
***
It was the second night, past midnight, and the house was still.
Imogen could not sleep. She had tried for two hours, lying in the blue bedroom with the curtains open, the moonlight coming in through the tall windows and the silence of a country house settling around her. It was the particular silence of old stone, old wood, servants who had gone to their quarters, guests who had gone to their chambers and a building that was finally, after a long evening of noise and performance, breathing on its own.
She put on her dressing gown over her night-rail, pulled her shawl over both, and she went downstairs to the library, on the theory that ducal libraries kept better hours than ducal beds and that a book might accomplish what two hours of ceiling-staring had not.
The library door was ajar. Lamplight spilled into the corridor, a thin warm line of it that told her someone else had beaten her to the books. She pushed the door open.
Ash was sitting in a leather chair beside the fireplace in his shirtsleeves, his coat and cravat discarded somewhere, his collar open, the white linen of his shirt loose against his throat. A glass of brandy sat untouched at his elbow. A book was open in his lap, but he was not reading it, and the not-reading was visible in the angle of his face and the distance in his eyes. The particular look of a man who had opened a book to give his hands something to do while his mind was elsewhere.
He looked up when she came in. His eyes found her in the doorway, barefoot in her night-rail, dressing gown and her shawl, and something moved across his face that she had notseen before. Something that was neither desire nor surprise but was closer to recognition, as if he had been waiting for her without knowing he was waiting and had only just realized what the waiting was for.
He did not stand. He gestured to the chair opposite his, a small movement of his hand that was neither formal nor casual but was simply an invitation, offered quietly.
She sat.
The library was warm and dim, the bookshelves rising to the ceiling on three walls, the spines of the books catching the lamplight in muted gold, green and burgundy. The room smelled of leather and old paper, and it was the most comfortable room she had been in since arriving at Ravenhurst Park, because it was the only room that felt as if it belonged to someone.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
He turned the book so she could see the spine.Laclos.Les Liaisons Dangereuses. She raised her eyebrows.
“The Vicomte or the Marquise?” she asked.
