“You never fail to flatter me,” he murmured. “However, I have a better idea.”
“Youcannotsuppose we should get married!”
He sent her amused glance. “No, I had not supposed we should marry, but I believe it serves us both to continue the engagement a little longer.” This time, his glance was calculating. “After all, Lady Charlotte, it has not escaped my notice you have an amorous cousin you are avoiding.”
“Sebastian is… he’s a good man.”
“So he may be, but you’re not in love with him.” It seemed absurd to be discussing such things so soon after having kissed—and having kissed with such provocation. Charlotte pressed the backs of her hands to her cheeks.
“What would you know about it?” she asked, her words unintentionally bitter.
“Am I wrong?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, pacing away from him. Her lips still tingled with the feeling of him. The heat hadn’t fully dissipated through her; she felt him still in the lingering echoes of longing in her body. Longing for what, she couldn’t say—for him, for more, for the tightness in her stomach to be unwound. For the world to be put back to normal without the Duke in it.
“As I’m right,” he continued, pretending not to notice her discomfort, “then it’s most certainly in our best interests to continue the engagement.”
“Then what?”
“When my sister is found, and you’ve discovered another man you would prefer to marry, we may part ways as amicable friends.”
“This is absurd.” She resisted the urge to run her fingers through her hair. “Your Grace, you must concede this is absurd.”
“No more absurd than waking up one morning to discover an engagement to a girl I did not know—and indeed, did not know until today. How could I have supposed the same girl I’m now promised to is the girl who kissed me in the gardens of my own house?”
“Youkissedme.”
“Nuance.” He smiled, and she couldn’t quite look away at the careless charm of it. “Confess, my plan is an excellent one, and you will lose nothing. In fact, you stand to have a lot to gain.”
“How so?”
“Because,” he said, tucking a loose strand of hair back behind her ear, oblivious to the fact that the simple gesture—and the intimacy of it—stopped her breath, “men are simple creatures. They want what they cannot have.”
“But my dowry—”
“If I can overlook it, they will.”
“You,” she said dryly, “are an extremely rich man.”
“Mine is not the only fortune in London, Lady Charlotte, and you shall soon see how true that is. Your cousin cannot propose while we are engaged, and while you uphold the engagement, you will be inundated with dance partners. Consider which of those you wish to marry, and when we mutually part ways, I guarantee he will be yours.”
“And you?”
He smiled. “It shall be very convenient to have some gossip about me that doesn’t involve my sister.”
ChapterSix
“Itake it you and the Duke have concluded to continue your engagement,” Anastasia said the next morning when Charlotte entered the drawing room after her morning walk. Sebastian was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen; he had all but shunned her after she had danced the remaining dances with the Duke, and she hadn’t encountered him yet that morning. Marcella, too, was notably absent.
“The Duke and I have come to an arrangement,” Charlotte said cautiously. They’d promised to speak of their arrangement to no one, but she couldn’t resist adding, “We see it as prudent to continue the engagement.”
“My daughter, a Duchess.” Anastasia sighed. “It is all I could ever have hoped for.”
Charlotte glanced away. “Yes, well, we have yet to be married.”
“If you are to be married, there can be no cause for delay, surely?”
“There is the matter of his sister,” Charlotte reminded her mother. A convenient matter, indeed; if it was not for Constance, they would have no excuse to delay the marriage any period of time, and Charlotte would have no time to find a new suitor. “You know we cannot even think of such a thing while she’s missing.”
