“And your sister has not said as much?”
“My sister will never tell me. She thinks it would hurt me, so she will not tell me. I will marry him this autumn, and she will spend the rest of her life watching me ruin them both, and I… I cannot.”
Alice had said too much. She heard the catch in her own voice and tried to smooth it, but it was too late. He had heard it.
“So, you would ruin yourself to give your sister a chance,” he said.
She nodded.
She had never said the reason aloud before. She had told Joanna she meant to be ruined tonight but had not told her why. She had said it to her pillow at three in the morning. She had said it to her own face in the mirror, very softly, to see if she could. She had not said it to a person.
“It might sound silly to you,” she began. “But?—”
“It does not.”
She looked at him.
It was the way he said it. Not flippant. Not cool. But quiet, with a finality that caught her low in the chest and held. As though, in the space of one short sentence, he had decided that she was a person he had perhaps not quite met yet.
The Ice Duke, the man who had stood in a dark lane two years ago and forbidden her from coming to his house, was now looking at her with something so unlike the coldness of that night that for a moment she did not know what to do with her face.
“You do not think it silly,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He did not answer at once.
He had a way of waiting before he spoke that she had, over the past two years, found maddening. He used it as a weapon. He used it as a wall. He was using it tonight at her shoulder in the middle of the Worthington ball, and she watched his profile in the candlelight and waited.
“I had a brother,” he revealed.
She did not know what to do with that.
She did not know he had ever had a brother. She knew he had a sister, and she knew his father was dead. She had never asked anything of him beyond what was required by her friendship with Joanna because asking things of the Duke of Langton had never seemed a useful way to spend a conversation. She had not known about his brother.
Had a brother. Past tense.
“Your Grace…”
“I know what it is like to do impossible things for a sibling, Lady Alice.” His eyes had not left her. “I would not call it silly.”
She felt the ground shift slightly under her slippers.
It was a small thing. It was a small, plain confession of three sentences in the corner of a ballroom, and she felt herself open like a hand.
She closed it again at once. She had to. The Duke of Langton was not permitted, by any of the rules she had been operating on for two years, to be a person who had loved a brother enough to mention him to a stranger.
She looked away. “Well then,” she said, her voice almost steady, “you understand. Please excuse me, Your Grace. I have a viscount to find.”
“You are not going anywhere near a viscount.”
“You cannot stop me.”
“Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
