“I did not take you for someone who cares about such things?”
His eyebrow rose.
“Romance? Not in life. In the abstract, yes. It is charming the way it makes young people dream. Also not-so-young people. In reality, I think it turns people into hapless fools—that notion of longing for and chasing after love.”
“That must be why you always appeared to be untouched in society.”
“Untouched?” He leaned forward as though examining something rather interesting.
“You always seemed untouched by all of it,” she said. “In society. As though nothing could reach you. The women who chased after you, their mothers, and so on.”
“Did I?”
“You know you did.” She looked at him across the fire. “I used to find it considerably off-putting.”
“And now?”
She considered. “Now I find it significantly more understandable which is not the same as finding it less off-putting.”
He smiled then. It changed his face in a way she was not prepared for, and she looked back at the fire.
“Appearances,” he said. “People see what you show them, and they stop looking. It is considerably safer than the alternative.”
“And what is the alternative?”
“Letting them see something worth looking at,” he said, “and then having to care what they do with it.”
He was watching the fire now, and she was grateful for it because the expression on his face was not one she had seen before, and she could not quite look away.
“You said,” she began, “that love mostly turns intelligent people into hapless fools.”
“I stand by that.”
“And yet…” She gestured vaguely at the room, the inn, the carriage outside, the general situation. “… her we are.”
“What are you implying, Lady Clara?”
His eyes bore into hers, and she swallowed hard, shaking her head. “I mean, Arabella. The things we are both doing for Arabella. Out of love.”
“That,” he said, “is obligation. Not love.”
“Is it?”
“Familiar love, then. Love born out of friendship.”
“And yet, it has made us both fools. So perhaps you were right.”
“Perhaps I was too limited in my assessment. Perhaps love makes us all foolish, no matter the sort of love it is.”
She did not answer. The fire shifted, and a log dropped. Julian leaned forward to adjust the grate, pressing the iron latch to let more air into the flame. The metal had been sitting in the heat too long. The latch shifted, and the edge of it caught his palm. He pulled his hand back sharply.
He grumbled under his breath in a manner that told her the words emerging were colorful indeed though he spoke them quietly enough that she could not hear them.
“Let me see,” she said.
“It is nothing.”
“Julian.”
