Page 23 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

She was in love with him.

The realization arrived without the slightest hint of grandeur, which Caroline thought rather rude of it. In her younger and considerably more optimistic years, she might have imagined such a moment accompanied by a swelling violin or at the very least a flattering ray of afternoon light. Instead there was nothing but the quiet, dreadful certainty of a truth that had apparently been in residence for quite some time and had merely been waiting for a suitably inconvenient moment to make itself known. It chose, with shocking indelicacy, to do so in the middle of the Royal Academy, beside a portrait of an admiral who looked as though he had never been surprised by anything in his entire life.

Caroline looked away at once. She fixed her attention on a rather uninspired still life across the room and breathed with the sort of careful, deliberate composure one cultivated only after a year marked by far too many occasions that required precisely that skill.

It was perfectly fine, she told herself. Entirely manageable. She had known, in some distant and resolutely unexamined corner of her mind, that this was possible. She was not the sort of woman who spent two weeks finding a gentleman’s laugh inconveniently pleasant for no reason at all. She had merely chosen not to examine the possibility too closely, because examining it too closely had always seemed, until this very moment, quite unnecessary.

Well. There it was.

She was in love with a man who was leaving England in a manner of two weeks.

She was in love with a man she had agreed, with full mutual understanding, would not be making her any offers of consequence upon the end of their…partnership.

She was, she concluded with the sort of bleak and comprehensive resignation that could only follow a truly thorough examination of one's circumstances, in a great deal of trouble.

Edward appeared at her shoulder. "Shall we find somewhere for tea?"

"Yes," said Caroline, with a composure she felt was frankly heroic.

"Let us do that."

They found a tearoom two streets over, the sort of establishment with small round tables, slightly worn tablecloths, and elderly waitresses who had very clearly been present since the dawn of time and moved with the calm authority of those who had decided long ago that the patrons were merely a temporary inconvenience in an otherwise properly ordered world.

It was, Caroline thought, a perfectly acceptable tearoom. There was nothing offensive about it. Nothing remarkable about it either, which suited her mood rather well, as she wished desperately to contain all the remarkable things in her mind right now.

She looked at the tablecloth. She looked at her tea. She looked, with a distinct lack of wisdom, at Edward’s hands around his cup and immediately wished she had chosen any other object in the room upon which to rest her gaze. He had very nice, large hands. She had felt the warmth of them on her body when he had first stopped her from falling during their initial encounter. She damned her own mind and tried in vain to rid herself of such untimely memories.

“I was thinking,” Edward said, “for the third outing, we might arrange something a little more ambitious.”

He leaned back in his chair with the sort of easy confidence that suggested he had never once doubted a plan in his life, especially not one he was currently rather pleased with.

“There is a concert at the Hanover Square Rooms on the twenty-first. And I had thought perhaps, before that, we might visit the menagerie at the Tower, if you are not entirely opposed to the company of large animals.”

"And then what?"

The words escaped her before she had quite decided to grant them permission, which was, Caroline reflected with a sudden clarity, entirely unlike her usual habits. They settled between them on the table as though they had been there all along, waiting for the proper moment to make themselves known.

Edward paused.

He regarded her with that steady attention of his, the sort that had once made her feel rather singularly important and now, for reasons she was not in the mood to examine too closely, made her feel as though she were being carefully observed for signs of structural weakness.

“I beg your pardon?” he said at last. She thought he sounded genuinely confused.

“And then what?” Caroline repeated. Her tone was even, precisely as she intended it to be. She had, after all, spent a considerable portion of her life ensuring that her voice would not betray her under circumstances such as these, and she was not at all inclined to allow a gentleman from New York to undo that effort in a single afternoon. “We have the third engagement. The concert, or perhaps the menagerie if we are feeling especially daring. And then what happens? You return to New York, I remain in London, and we exchange the sort of polite farewell that suggests we are acquaintances and nothing more?”

Edward set his cup down with the kind of care usually reserved for matters of state rather than crockery. One might have thought the porcelain had feelings and a fragile reputation to protect. When he answered, it was slowly, as though each word required consultation with a rather crowded and slightly disorganized mental library.

“I had not suggested it would be the end of our lifelong friendship,” he said. “In fact, correspondence would be entirely possible. And we might see one another again one day, should you come to New York, or should I find myself in London.”

“That is not what I asked,” Caroline said at once.

Her voice was steady, which she considered an accomplishment under the circumstances. “I asked what happens to us. In the long run. What this is.”

She made that small gesture again, the one she had made weeks ago in the sitting room when words had failed her. A slight movement of her hand, indicating the space between them as though it were a thing that could be measured and understood. Of course he noticed it. Edward noticed everything. And she saw something shift in his expression, something brief and unhelpfully unreadable, like a thought he had not quite decided whether to share.

“Caroline.” He said her name with a gentleness that she found, at this precise moment, entirely unreasonable. “What is it that you want me to say, Caroline?”

She jolted. It was the first time, she suddenly realized, that he had called her by her name directly.