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“Perhaps not.” Leonora did not argue the point, which somehow disarmed him more thoroughly than if she had. “But I do not think she meant any harm by it, Anthony. I watched her face while you were speaking with that gentleman. I do not think she entirely remembers agreeing to keep it quiet at all. It may simply have slipped from her the way a great many things slip from her now, and by the time she realized what she had done, half the room already knew, and there was no undoing it.”

Anthony looked at her for a long moment, and felt something ache in his chest. He knew she was right. He had known it, somewhere beneath the anger, from the moment Marian had first opened her mouth to that gentleman with his glass raised in salute.

He knew, too, exactly how much this arrangement had already asked of Leonora, more than three months of companionship, more than she had ever agreed to, and he knew she had grown fond of his grandmother somewhere in the process rather than merely enduring her for the sake of a bargain. He wanted, badly, to say some part of that to her now, standing here in the quiet of the entrance hall with her hand still warm in his.

He did not trust himself to say any of it properly. Not tonight, not with his temper still sitting so close to the surface, threatening to come out wrong no matter how carefully he tried to shape it.

“Get some rest,” he said instead. “We will talk in the morning. All of us.”

Leonora studied him a moment longer, as though she meant to press him further, and then apparently thought better of it, releasing his hand with a small nod. “Good night, Anthony.”

“Good night.”

He watched her climb the stairs, and did not move from the entrance hall until she had disappeared from sight. Only then did he allow himself to loosen the last of the tension in his shoulders, dragging a hand down his face in the empty quiet of the hall.

She was right. Marian had not meant to wound him, had likely forgotten within minutes that there had ever been anything to keep quiet in the first place, and he would owe her an apology come morning for the whole of what he had said to her in that carriage, however justified he had felt saying it at the time.

He thought, too, of Leonora’s face in the hall just now, the calm, the way she had simply told him to breathe. He was not accustomed to being managed so easily by anyone, least of all by a woman who owed him nothing beyond the strict terms of a bargain they had struck. He did not yet know what to do with that thought, only that it sat alongside the anger rather than replacing it, and that both would need sorting through properly, in daylight, with a clearer head than he currently possessed.

Tonight, though, he had nothing left in him for apologies. Only enough, finally, to climb the stairs himself, find his own bed, and let the house go quiet around him until morning gave him something sane to work with.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“We ought to simply let it stand.”

Anthony looked up from behind his desk, one eyebrow rising in a manner that suggested he had expected her to say a great many things this morning, and that had not been among them. “Let it stand?”

“The engagement. What your grandmother told half of London last night, we cannot very well take it back now.” Leonora settled herself into the chair across from him, folding her hands in her lap with more composure than she actually felt.

She had slept poorly, turning the whole tangled mess of the evening over and over until sleep had simply given up on her sometime near dawn, and she had arrived at his study this morning with a solution already fixed in her mind, the way she generally preferred to arrive at difficult conversations. “We continue as we are for three months, exactly as originally arranged, and then we end it.”

“What about your reputation?”

“What of it?”

“Leonora.” He said her name the way he had taken to saying it lately, low and edged. “A broken engagement is a considerably different matter from a companionship that quietly ends. Half the ton believes you are engaged to a duke this morning. If that engagement dissolves in three months, there will be talk. There is always talk, and it rarely lands kindly on the woman.”

“I am aware of how gossip works, Your Grace. I have lived under its weight for two years now, same as my sisters did before me.” She kept her voice light, though something in her chest had tightened at the reminder, an old, familiar ache she had long since learned to live with. “I do not particularly care what is said of me once this is over. I never intended to make a match in London to begin with. Whatever talk follows me will follow me quietly, into whatever corner of the country I eventually retreat to, and I shall not be here to hear the worst of it.”

Anthony was quiet for a moment, studying her with an expression she could not entirely place, something between frustration and a sort of wary concern she had not expected from him. He rose from behind the desk, and she thought at first he meant to pace, but instead he came around to her side of it, closing the distance between them and lowered his head to her, near enough that she had to tilt her chin slightly to keep looking at him.

“Promise me something,” he said.

Leonora swallowed, challenging herself to keep her eyes on his. “That depends entirely on what it is.”

“Promise me you will never say that to another man. Not in company, not in confidence, not even as a jest.” His voice had dropped, low and unusually intent, and Leonora found herself startled by the seriousness of it. “A woman who claims not to care what is said of her, who is careless of her own reputation in front of the wrong sort of company, is a woman certain men will take considerable advantage of. Not all of them will be as harmless as I am.”

Her lips twitched. “You consider yourself harmless?”

“Do not deflect.”

She had meant it as a small joke, a way of easing whatever had suddenly gone taut in the room, and found instead that it had done nothing at all to loosen it. He was still watching her, still standing closer than the conversation strictly required, and his face told her he would not let this go until she gave him what he was asking for.

She studied him a moment, trying to work out where this had come from, this sudden insistence over what had begun as an offhand remark, hardly worth the weight he was giving it. It occurred to her, watching the tightness at the corner of his mouth, that this was not truly about her at all, or not only about her. There was something older sitting behind it, some memory or fear he was not offering to explain and she did not think she had any right to ask after, not standing this close to him, not with the whole of the morning already so thick with things neither of them had quite said aloud.

“You are frightening me a little,” she admitted, more honestly than she had intended.

“Good.” He did not soften it. “You ought to be frightened by the notion, if not by me. There is a considerable difference between the two, and I would rather you understand it now than learn it the hard way, from someone who does not have your interests anywhere near his own.”