“Debrett’s,” Devlin said instantly, leaning back in his chair. “A page, a finger, a name. You take what the fates serve up.”
Ash ought to have refused. The absence in his chest, the quiet gray space that had replaced any mechanism for wanting, demanded nothing more than another glass of brandy and a carriage ride home. Simulating tenderness required acting, and acting required energy.
He set Lisette off his lap. She went gracefully, settling herself on the arm of Rourke’s chaise without complaint, an easy redistribution of her evening. Ash stood, straightening his waistcoat, and glanced toward the half-open door where Aurelie’s man lingered.
“Bring me a copy of Debrett’s.”
The servant blinked. “Your Grace?”
“A peerage,” Ash clarified, his tone leaving no room for a second question. “Now.”
He opened the volume at random. The page that fell open was somewhere near the middle of the G- entries, a columnof names in small black type, families that occupied the middle distance of English society without ever quite arriving at its center. Baronets. The younger sons of younger sons. The respectable and the forgotten.
He closed his eyes, placed his finger on the page and let it rest there for the length of one slow breath, and then opened his eyes.
Miss Imogen Goodall. Daughter of the late Sir Philip Goodall, Bt., of Hertfordshire. Fourth season. No recorded suitors.
He said the name aloud once. “Imogen Goodall.”
It sat in the room the way a pebble sits in a pond, making no impression, disturbing nothing. He searched his own chest for some movement, some flicker, some reaction to the name of the woman whose season he had just agreed to ruin with his attention. There was nothing. The absence held.
“The terms are acceptable,” he said.
Devlin’s smile arrived slowly, and it was the smile of a man who had just been given a toy he intended to break. “Five thousand and the chestnut, by the thirtieth of June. The lady falls in love. You report progress. I keep score.”
“You keep nothing,” Ash said, and his voice was flat and cool in a way that made Aldous glance at the door. “I will win your wager because I am bored, Devlin, not because you are clever. Do not confuse the two.”
He stood. The room rearranged itself around his standing, the way rooms always did, the courtesans shifting, Rourke pulling his feet off the chaise, Aldous making himself smaller without meaning to. The Duke of Ravenhurst standing up in a room full of men was not a small event, and the weather shifted accordingly.
He did not put on his coat. It was draped across the back of his chair where he had thrown it three hours ago, the dark woolcreased from the careless way he had discarded it, but he left it there because the night was already growing pale through the salon windows, the walk to his carriage would be short, and the early April air might do something useful to the fog in his head.
The watch was in his hand again. He did not remember taking it out. His thumb found the hinge, and this time he opened it fully, in the corridor where no one could see, and looked at the small portrait inside. Gouache on ivory, no larger than a sovereign. A young woman with pale eyes and dark hair and a mouth that was smiling in a way that suggested the painter had said something funny and she had not entirely decided whether to forgive him for it.
His mother. Painted the year before she married his father. Dead of a fever when Ash was eleven.
His father had carried the watch for thirty-one years. Ash had carried it for eight. Between the two of them it had not been set down since before the century turned, and the weight of it in his palm was the only weight that had never become part of the absence.
He closed the casing and slid it into his waistcoat pocket. He walked down the stairs and through the front door of Aurelie’s into the thin gray light of a London dawn, the cobblestones still wet from the rain that had passed through while he was inside, not caring about anything.
His valet, Collins, was waiting at the kerb beside the carriage, upright and expressionless in the particular way of a man who had been waiting since midnight and would wait until noon if required because the Duke of Ravenhurst’s indifference to time was not a thing that could be corrected by a servant. Collins took one look at Ash, coatless, his cravat half-undone and his hair pushed back from his forehead by a hand that had run through it too many times, and opened the carriage door without comment.
“Home,” Ash said.
He climbed in. The leather was cold. The carriage rocked forward, and through the window the pale sky was turning from gray to the faintest suggestion of color at the eastern edge of the city, light that arrived whether anyone was awake to see it or not.
He thought about the name once more.Imogen Goodall.Hertfordshire. Fourth season. No recorded suitors. A woman so thoroughly overlooked that the ton’s own directory listed her with the biographical enthusiasm of a parish register.
He did not think about what it meant to make a woman like that believe that she could be loved by a man like him. He did not think about the ten weeks, or the five thousand, or the chestnut, or the way Devlin’s smile had changed when Ash said the terms were acceptable. It was a shift so small that only someone who had spent eight years studying the mechanics of other people’s faces while feeling nothing in his own would have caught it.
He thought about nothing and he was very good at it.
The carriage rolled through the empty streets toward Grosvenor Square, the dawn came on regardless, and the watch in his waistcoat pocket kept its own time in the dark.
Chapter Two
“You cannot hide behind shrubbery for the entire season, Imogen. Someone will notice.”
“Nobody has noticed for four seasons, Cassie. I see no reason the foliage should fail me now.”
