Page 22 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

"Your parents," Edward said at last, in the quiet tone he used when he already suspected he knew her answer. "Did they never offer you anything of the sort to observe?"

Caroline laughed. It escaped her with a sharper edge than she intended, and she tamed it at once. "I very much doubt," she said, "that my parents' affection for one another survived even a single afternoon. How three children resulted from that arrangement remains a biological puzzle I have never felt the slightest urge to unravel."

She delivered her words lightly, as she always did, with that particular gloss she had perfected, the one that could turn the unpleasant into a mere witticism. Edward did not laugh. She noticed that. Instead he looked over at her, and his eyes had grown darker, the warmth in them settling into something she found more difficult to meet than she cared to admit.

"And you?" he asked. His voice had dropped. At some point in the last thirty seconds he had moved closer, or perhaps the afternoon had simply conspired to draw them toward one another without anyone giving it permission to do so. "Do you imagine a long love life for yourself? Is that something you desire?"

Caroline's heart chose that moment to behave in a most unreasonable manner. It beat with a lively irregularity she associated with dancing far too vigorously, not with a quiet stroll along a public path. She swallowed, hoping he did not hear it, and allowed her gaze to drift toward the middle distance, toward the park railings, toward anything that was not the look on his face.

"Of course it is something I want," she said. She was relieved to discover that her voice remained almost perfectly steady, despite her heart's continued theatrics. "Does not everyone wish for such a thing?"

It was not, of course, the full answer. The full answer would have included the second part of his question, the part about whether she believed she would ever have such a thing, and that portion she had chosen, quite purposefully, to leave untouched. He heard the omission. She could tell by the brief and thoughtful pause that followed, the small silence of a man who had noticed precisely what she had declined to say.

She waited for him to press her.

He did not.

"There is a very fine tea room," he said instead, his tone slipping back into its familiar easy warmth with the confidence of a man who understood his own timing, "two streets from here. I am told their Battenberg is exceptional, although I must admit I remain entirely unsure what a Battenberg is, and whether the discovery will prove favorable upon acquaintance."

Caroline released the breath she had not realized she was hoarding and looked at him with something that felt, in the quietest part of herself, very much like relief and something else she was not prepared to examine. "It is a sponge cake," she said. "Almond flavored, with apricot jam. I find it quite pleasant."

"How delightfully english! Then by all means," he said, and offered his arm.

Caroline took it, and the afternoon carried them forward easily, as though the awkward question between them had never been asked at all.

She thought about it the entire way to the tea room. She was still thinking about it over the Battenberg, which proved to be, as advertised, exceptional.

Chapter 11

August 16th

It was the sort of afternoon that London occasionally produced as though in apology for all its other afternoons, the ones that were grey and drizzling and wholly indifferent to one's plans. The sky was a clean, generous blue, and the air carried that particular quality of warmth that made the city look, just for a moment, rather more charming than it had any right to be.

Caroline had worn her best blue spencer. This was, she told herself with admirable conviction, not in the least because she hoped to impress anyone but herself. It was a lie of the most harmless variety, and she clung to it with the determination of a woman who had already dressed and refused to admit she had done so with a particular gentleman in mind.

The note delivered that morning had informed her that Edward intended to take her to the Royal Academy. This had struck her, at first reading, as the sort of declaration one made when one meant something entirely different. The Royal Academy did not, in any conceivable world, seem a place she would associate with Edward Reinhart. He was, she had learned, a man of sincere enthusiasms rather than fashionable ones. He liked things that were real. It was astonishingly disarming.

And so she had arrived at the Academy in a state of quiet anticipation

The paintings, as it happened, were remarkable.

She would not have said so, of course, because saying so would have made her seem precisely the sort of woman who was impressed by things, and Caroline Bingley was not in the habit of allowing anyone to think her impressionable. She merely stood before each canvas a touch longer than was strictly necessary, and if she happened to comment on the brushwork in a way that drew Edward’s warm and quiet attention, she did not consider this the least bit enthusiastic. It was simply accuracy.

He was very good at looking at her without making her feel looked at, which she had decided was either a rare and enviable talent or a deeply unfair advantage granted to him by some capricious fate.

"You like it," he said, nodding toward a landscape she had been examining for the better part of three minutes.

"I am evaluating it," Caroline replied with impeccable dignity.

"You like it," He repeated with a shamelessly proud grin. Ah, she realized. So thats why he had brought her here. She was to look at the paintings while he looked at her face.

She moved on to the next painting. Edward followed with an ease she no longer even attempted to find irritating. She had spent the first week of their acquaintance attempting to discover some aspect of Edward Reinhart that might properly annoy her, and she had failed so completely that she suspected she ought to schedule another attempt when she felt more energetic.

It was somewhere in the third room that she made the tactical error of looking at him.

He was studying a portrait of a long-dead admiral with a solemnity she suspected was at least half theatrical. One hand rested in his coat pocket, his head tilted at a slight angle, and he was smiling to himself about something. Some private observation. Some hidden amusement. Something he had not yet chosen to share.

Caroline looked at him and felt it strike squarely in her chest, as neatly and as mercilessly as an arrow loosed by an archer who had not bothered to offer her the courtesy of a warning.