***
She thought about him while reading, while sewing the panel into the waist of her ivory gown, which needed letting out because the gown had been made three years ago and her body had quietly continued to change shape without consulting her wardrobe. She thought about him while walking with Cassie in the park, and while listening to Aunt Margery’s commentary on the price of candles. Most of all she thought about him while lying in bed and wondering whether a duke who laughed without permission was the same thing as a duke who could be trusted.
She did not write to him. She did not inquire after him. She read her Crébillon, kept her own counsel, and waited, because waiting was what Imogen Goodall did. She had been doing it for four seasons; she was very good at it, but she hated it.
***
The Montford musicale was three evenings later, and the Italian soprano in the music room was either magnificent or punishing, depending on whether one had come for the music or for the conversation happening underneath it.
Imogen had come for neither. She had come because Aunt Margery had received the card and had said, gently and persistently, that it would be good for Imogen to be seen. Being seen, in Aunt Margery’s vocabulary, meant standing near a wall in one’s second-best evening gown and hoping someone would notice, and Imogen had spent four seasons being seen in precisely this manner and had yet to find any evidence that the seeing was reciprocal.
She was standing near the wall now. The soprano was reaching for something ambitious in the upper register, and the audience was arranged in the Montford music room in neat rows of gilt chairs, fans moving, gloved hands folded, faces politely attentive or politely asleep depending on their relationship to the hostess. Aunt Margery was four chairs in, already listing toward her neighbor’s shoulder. Cassie was seated beside Miss Drayton, whispering behind her programme.
Imogen was not seated. She had given up her chair to a stout matron who had arrived late and breathless and who had looked at Imogen’s chair as if her corset were winning a war against her ribs and the chair were the only available surrender. Imogen had yielded without complaint and retreated to the corridor side of the room, where the door stood half-open, the air was cooler, and the soprano’s highest notes were slightly less likely to cause permanent damage.
“You are not enjoying the music, Miss Goodall.”
She did not jump. She refused to jump. The Duke of Ravenhurst had appeared beside her without warning, as if materialising from dim corridors were a skill they taught at whatever school produced men like him. He was standing close enough that the sleeve of his coat was an inch from her bare arm, and the inch was doing more work than any inch of air had any right to do.
“I am enjoying the music very much, Your Grace. I am enjoying it from a safe distance.”
“Is that your habit? Enjoying things from a safe distance?”
The question landed differently than he had probably meant it to, and they both heard it land, but neither of them corrected it. His eyes found hers in the low light of the corridor side, and she saw something move in them, a flicker of awareness that the conversation had shifted underneath him without his permission.
“May I find you a glass of ratafia?” he asked. “The Montford cellars are said to be better than their soprano.”
“That is not a high bar, Your Grace.”
“Nevertheless.”
She should have said no. Bethany’s voice was sitting in the back of her mind, clear and precise, telling her about Hambridges, beautiful sons and broken hearts. The voice was right, and sensible, but it was no match at all for the inch of air between his sleeve and her arm and the hum it carried.
She let him steer her into the corridor.
The corridor behind the music room was dim, lit by a single sconce at the far end, and it smelled of beeswax, old carpet and the particular musty warmth of a house that had been closed for most of the winter and opened hastily for the season. The music was muffled behind the half-closed door, the soprano’s voice reduced to a distant insistent vibration that might have been beautiful if Imogen had been paying any attention to it.
She was not paying attention to it. She was paying attention to the man walking beside her, to the sound of his boots on the worn carpet, to the length of his stride, which he had shortened to match hers, and to the fact that his arm, the one nearest her, was held at his side with a tension that suggested he was thinking about touching her and had not yet decided whether to allow himself the indulgence. She could see the tendons in his wrist above the edge of his glove.
The ratafia, she noticed, had not been mentioned again. He had not turned toward the refreshment table and had not asked a footman. The ratafia had been a pretext, and they both knew it, and the knowing sat between them in the dim corridor like a third person neither of them was willing to acknowledge.
The moment the corridor went quiet around them, she stopped walking, and he stopped beside her. The sconce at the end of the hall threw his shadow long against the floor, and hersbeside it, and the two shadows did not quite touch. She could feel the heat of his body from where she stood, the warmth radiating through the small space between them, and she was suddenly, acutely aware of her own body in a manner that had nothing to do with modesty and everything to do with proximity.
“What do you want, Your Grace?”
He turned. His face in the low light was all angles, the scar at his mouth catching the sconce flame, his pale eyes darker in the dimness than they appeared in daylight.
“Be plain,” she said, and her voice was steady, but her hands at her sides were not. “I have read enough to know what a man like you wants from a woman like me, and I should rather we had it spoken aloud than acted upon by sleight of hand.”
Something changed in his expression. She had surprised him, and the surprise was genuine; it almost made her take the words back, because she had not expected to find real surprise on the face of a man who had spent eight seasons performing every emotion the ton had ever asked of him.
He kissed her instead of answering.
His hand came up to her jaw first, his gloved fingers settling along the line of her face, tilting her chin. Then his mouth found hers, and the finding was not tentative. It was a slow, deliberate arrival, his lips warm, the pressure of him steady and certain, and for one bright disorienting second the world narrowed to the place where his mouth met hers, and everything else fell away.
She pushed him back two full steps. His shoulders hit the corridor wall, his hand left her jaw, and for the briefest moment they stood apart, breathing, the muffled soprano still climbing somewhere behind the closed door.
Then she kissed him back.
