“I did not say it was,” she replied, raising her chin. She looked up at him and smiled because that was what was expected of her, and she would deliver it.
“Good,” he said. “Now. The others will already have begun passing the story along, but I will make sure to speak to Mrs. Westchester before the evening is out. She supplies titbits to the gazette. I shall tell her how we met in Scotland after you arrived there.”
“We ought also to remind people that we have known each other a great deal longer than that,” she said, turning smoothly as the music directed. “That this was not sudden.”
“Indeed.” He looked at her. “Do you remember when we first met?”
“I was a child,” she said. “I would not remember the specific details.”
That was a lie. She knew exactly when she had first met him. She had been six years old and had come to visit Arabella. The two of them had been running together on the gravel path in the garden when she had fallen, scraping her knee so badly that blood had soaked through her stocking and stained her gown. The governess, a woman with rather too much panic at her disposal, had made everything considerably worse. But then someone had lifted her—she could almost still feel it, the firm hold under her arms—and Julian had carried her downstairs to the still room where a maid had cleaned and bound the wound while she was changed into one of Arabella’s dresses.
He had told them jokes all the while, he and Arabella, making them laugh until their stomachs hurt. Arabella had told her that part afterwards because she had been laughing too hard to remember it herself.
And then he had taken them to the kitchen and given Clara her first taste of marzipan.
“You are smiling,” Julian said.
“So I am,” she replied.
“You remember.”
“The day you caused my permanent attachment to marzipan? Yes.” She glanced at him. “I suppose I have you to thank for that at least.”
“You are very welcome,” he said with a small and almost shy smile, and for a moment—one inconveniently real moment—she smiled back at him genuinely. Not the careful smile she had been wearing since the doors opened. A real one.
A flicker crossed his face. Pain, perhaps, or something close to it. She was not entirely certain which. Whatever it was, she told herself he had brought it on himself.
“I suppose knowing you has not been entirely without its merits,” she said.
The flicker again. Then the music slowed, and the dance came to its end.
She was already beginning to turn away when he pulled her back. Pulled her hard enough that she came up against him, her chest against his, and the room erupted in a low collective sound of delight. Then he pressed his lips to hers.
She wanted to pull back. She knew she ought to. She knew exactly what this was, it was for the room, for the story, for the hundred and twenty people watching. She knew all of that.
She still did not pull back.
When he stepped away and let her go, she felt the loss of it before she had even fully registered what had happened.
“That was not agreed upon,” she said.
“No,” he said. “But I daresay it will rather cement our story.” He turned and bowed to the room while she curtsied, and then the two of them began to walk off the floor together.
How she managed it, she was not entirely sure because her legs had taken on a quality that suggested they were not fully committed to supporting her, and she was almost certain that if she looked down, she would find them wobbling. She did not look down. She kept her chin up and her smile in place and walked steadily across the floor.
She was very good at this. She had always loved the theatre.
It was just that tonight, rather more than usual, she could not quite work out which parts she was performing and which parts she was not.
CHAPTER 29
As Clara walked off the dance floor with as much dignity as she could muster, her legs felt unreliable beneath her, and her lips burned where he had kissed her.
She wanted nothing more than to turn around and ask him exactly what game he thought he was playing. A kiss like that, after days of cold civility. She looked around the ballroom and saw that it had done precisely what he had intended—people were beaming at them, leaning towards one another with delighted expressions, the room practically humming with it. It was working. Their story was being believed. She could see that perfectly well.
It did not make it hurt any less.
“You should not have done that,” she said when they were out of the earshot of their guests. “We did not agree to it.”
