“I am thanking God for that fact, Lady Alice.”
“You do not get to tell me what to do.”
“I do if what you want to do is crazy. It is my duty.”
“And it is my duty to make my little sister happy.”
He stopped.
She watched the words land. She watched him try to fit them into the picture he had been making of her, fail, and have to start over.
He frowned. The frown went deeper than any of his frowns this evening. It was a different frown, careful and slow. She could see him reaching for a question, discarding it, and reaching for another.
“Your sister,” he said.
“Daphne.”
“What does your sister have to do with you ruining yourself in a ballroom?”
She breathed out.
She looked down at her gloves, at the spot where the white silk had begun to fray at the inside of her wrist, where she had been pulling at it all evening without meaning to.
She had not slept the night before and the night before it. She had not slept properly since that dinner a week ago, and she could feel that fact now in the way her thoughts kept slipping their moorings, in the way her tongue had become slightly too loose, in the way that telling the truth to Cassian Arnolds had begun to seem, against all her better instincts, like a thing she might do.
“You must have heard about my betrothal to the Marquess of Dowton,” she muttered.
“What, does your betrothed not make your heart beat faster?” he mocked.
“No,” she sai, very simply. “But he makes my sister’s.”
He went still.
She kept her eyes on the dancers and slowly turned her fan in front of her chest, nodding toward the long windows on the far side of the room.
“Look at them, Your Grace.”
He did not turn at once.
She felt him hesitate. She felt the weight of his attention on the side of her face, the sharp intake of breath when he was about to disagree with someone, and then she felt him look.
He looked for a long time.
She did not need to look with him. She had been looking at her sister all evening. She had watched Daphne come down the stairs at home in the afternoon with her hands clasped at her waist and her cheeks already pink because she had known Isaac was attending.
She had watched Daphne arrange her hair in front of the mirror in a way Daphne had never arranged her hair before. She had watched Daphne stand in the carriage door for a full second before climbing in and smoothing her skirts the way a girl smoothed her skirts when she knew somebody was about to see her.
Now Daphne and Isaac were standing near the long windows with a polite gap between their bodies and a distance between their hands of perhaps three inches. Isaac was speaking. Daphne was nodding. Daphne had her glass of lemonade clasped in both hands, the way she clasped her teacup when she was nervous, the way she had clasped Alice’s hand when their dog had died when she was eight years old.
Anyone in the room could see it. Anyone with eyes.
“They are smitten with each other,” the Duke noted, his voice low.
“They are.”
“Plainly.”
“Yes.”
