Page 38 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
Theodore didn’t wait to see them reach the dance floor. He turned his back to make an exit, but Julia was already stepping into the space Euphemia had vacated.
“You are still playing the truant, Your Grace,” she rasped. “I am still quite incensed by your conduct at the estate. You knewfrom the start that the Pierce girl was an unsuitable match. My intentions were only ever for your preservation. Your mother would have loved to see you settled with someone of good standing, someone who —”
“My mother is not here, Julia,” Theodore interrupted, the words cutting through her sentence like a blade. He stepped closer, his shadow looming over her. “She is gone, and she has no more right to meddle in the wreckage of my life than you do. Do not use her ghost to justify your interference. Do not use her to justify your horrible actions. No one asked you to put your reputation on the line. You did this yourself. You do everything yourself.”
Julia recoiled slightly, her lips thinning into a bloodless line. The silence between them was no longer the polite friction of a godson and his godmother. It was the heavy, suffocating atmosphere.
Theodore glanced past her at the grand floor clock. The gilded hands were nearing the Roman numerals for twelve. He had no more patience for this war of attrition.
“I am finished with the theatrics for one evening,” he said, adjusting his cloak with a final, dismissive flick of his wrist. “I find I have a sudden need to retire from the noise for a while.”
He expected a retort, or perhaps another sharp reminder of his duties. Instead, Julia simply watched him, her expression shifting into something he could not decipher, and he typically could read her like a book. She didn't look surprised by hissudden departure... if anything, a slow shadow crossed her features.
“I suspect the night has a way of settling things, whether we wish it or not,” she remarked and tilted her head to the side.
He caught the strange, predatory glint in her eyes, a look that felt less like a goodbye and more like a woman watching a bird fly into a well-placed net. He brushed it off as another one of her cryptic attempts at gravity, a lingering bit of drama to salvage her wounded pride. He didn't have the energy to decode her moods. He turned away, disappearing into the crowd.
CHAPTER NINE
“So, Lord Sterling?”
Theodore’s voice preceded him into the room, dry and resonant. Emily startled. The book in her hands nearly slipped from her fingers before she caught it, pressing it flat against her chest with both palms. He stepped into the circle of candlelight, reaching up to peel the black velvet mask from his face. He looked weary, the sharp lines of his jaw tightened by a tension that had nothing to do with the hour.
The library was a long, narrow room on the eastern side of the Kingswell estate, lined floor to ceiling with dark shelves that smelled of old leather and beeswax. A reading table ran down the center of it, solid and wide, with two chairs tucked beneath it and a single lamp burning at one end that threw the rest of the room into warm, uneven shadow. At the far end, three tall windows looked out onto the garden, their heavy damask curtains drawn almost entirely closed, leaving only a thin blade of moonlight cutting across the floorboards. The curtains were a deep burgundy, thick enough to muffle the faint sound ofthe orchestra still playing somewhere in the house beyond the closed door.
“What about him?” Emily asked, her voice breathy, her eyes tracking his every movement.
Emily slowly took off her mask and placed it on the table. She had positioned herself between the reading table and the shelves. Her back was to the books, the lamp at her left, and when she turned to face him, she had nowhere to go. He doubted she had thought about that when she chose the spot.
He set his mask down on the reading table, leaned against its edge, braced one hand against the wood, and looked at her.
He had watched her dance with Lord Sterling earlier that evening. He had not meant to watch. He had been in conversation with Christopher on the other side of the ballroom. He had simply looked up at the wrong moment and found them there, moving through the figures of a cotillion, Sterling's hand at her gloved fingers, his head angled toward her with the attention of a man who was genuinely interested in what the woman across from him was saying. Emily had smiled. Had laughed at something, her head tilting in that particular way it tilted when a conversation had properly caught her, and she had looked, from where Theodore was standing, without meaning to be watching, entirely at ease.
It had bothered him.
He had no intention of examining that further.
“I saw you dancing, is all,” he said, his gaze dropping to the table for a moment before snapping back to hers. “You seemed to find his company quite... agreeable.”
He didn't wait for her to defend herself. He knew the clock was against them; every second they spent in this shadow-drenched room was a gamble with her reputation. If a servant or a stray guest wandered in, the scandal Julia had threatened would become an irreversible reality. He had to be fast. The raw, jagged way they had parted at his estate had been a festering wound all week, and he could tell by the way her fingers clutched the book that she was just as haunted by it as he was.
“We cannot stay here long,” he murmured, his voice dropping an octave as he moved around the table. “But after the wreckage of that morning at the conservatory, I couldn't allow another day to pass with the silence between us.”
Emily looked at him. She did not say anything.
He leaned against the reading table, his palms flat against the wood behind him, his weight settled back on his hands. She was to his left, her shoulder near the shelves, close enough that the lamplight caught the side of her face and threw the rest of it into shadow. They were not looking at each other directly. They were looking at the middle distance between them, which was perhaps easier.
“We cannot continue this courtship,” he said. “The charade is finished, Emily.”
He turned to look at her as he said it. He had expected something. A flicker of distress, perhaps, or the particular controlled blankness she deployed when something had landed and she was deciding how to receive it. What he saw instead was neither of those things. Her expression did not change in any dramatic way. She simply looked at him, steady and clear, and then she looked down at the book still resting on the table beside his hand.
“No,” she said. “I suppose we cannot.”
She said it quietly and then sighed.
“You have prospects,” he said. “Better ones, perhaps, than when this started. Whatever comes of this Season, your name has been attached to mine, and that will not disappear overnight, I suppose. Sterling seems genuinely interested.” He paused. “You looked well together. Better prospects than a man whose godmother is currently sharpening her knives for you, right?”
She paused, her gaze tracking the flickering candlelight on the table before she looked back at his face. They were quiet for a moment. The curtains shifted slightly at the window, some small movement of air from somewhere.
