“I am remarkably free with my opinions because I have had three Seasons in which to discover that nobody listens to a quiet woman. It is a survival instinct, Your Grace, like wearing a cloak in winter.”
“And the gentlemen you pointed at with your fan?”
“What about them?”
“Do you intend to share your opinions with them, too?”
“I intend to be civil to them.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“It is what I am answering.”
He angled his head just enough that she would feel it without seeing it, and he saw her shoulders rise an inch and resettle.
“Your Grace, as lovely as your company is, I have a mission, and I cannot complete it with you around.”
He went still.
It was the way she said it. Not flippant. Not quite. There was something underneath the lightness in her voice that pulled at his attention like a hook.
He turned his head to look at her properly, and for the first time tonight, she looked back.
Her eyes were tired. He had not noticed it from across the room. There was a fineness around her mouth, a tightness that he had assumed was caused by the heat.
It was not the heat. She had been laughing with his sister all evening, and now, looking at her up close, he could see that she had not slept.
He had not, until that moment, considered that something might have happened to her. He had assumed, with the long-practiced cynicism of a man who had been watching the ton for too long, that whatever Lady Alice was doing tonight was mischief and nothing else.
The look on her face was not mischievous. It was a thinner, harder thing, set just behind the brightness. He had spent enough years around his sister to know what a young woman looked like when she had spent the night before a ball not sleeping.
“And what mission might that be?”
She held his gaze. For a long beat, she did not answer.
He watched her decide. He watched her take a breath, let it out, and lift her chin in the way he remembered from the lane two years ago when she had told him she did not particularly care what he believed.
He understood dimly that whatever she was about to say was going to be the last thing he wanted to hear, and he was going to hear it anyway.
“If you must know, Your Grace, I must be ruined tonight.”
CHAPTER 2
He almost choked.
Alice watched it happen. She watched the Duke of Langton, the Ice Duke himself, the most insufferably composed man she had ever met, lose his composure for a full second and then snatch it back.
His jaw worked. He looked away from her and toward the dance floor, as though the dancers had insulted him, then looked back. A flush had crawled up his neck.
Good. She had been having a very bad week. Let him be flustered for a moment.
“What—” He stopped and started again. “What the devil do you mean by that?”
“I thought it was perfectly clear, Your Grace.”
“Lady Alice.”
“Why, Your Grace. You are blushing?”
