Page 39 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“But tell me something, Your Grace,” she finally said. “What was in this for you? Why did you agree to this arrangement in the first place? I don’t think I ever asked you that.”
He almost smiled. “You want to know why I agreed in the first place.”
“You told me you had no interest in marriage. You told me that clearly. Yet you danced with me twice and kissed my hand, agreed to pretend to court me, knowing my secret, and stood in your own conservatory and defended me in front of your godmother. Even though you don’t know the truth.” She tilted her head. “So yes. I want to know why.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he shifted his weight slightly on the table. There was no particular reason not to tell her, now that it was over.
“Lady Birks’ plan,” he said. “The list. The whole thing.” He paused. “I wanted it to fail. On my terms. I had intended to choose the worst possible candidate, someone she would take one look at and immediately regret the entire scheme.” He glanced at her sideways. “You were not the worst candidate, Emily. That was not why I agreed to court you. You were not what I had in mind.”
Emily looked at him.
“But then you told me about this child,” he said. “So I figured you were a woman with a secret that Lady Birks will never accept. The moment she found out, she would end it herself. I would not even have to do anything.” He turned to look at her properly. “I had no intention of letting anyone use it against you. What happened in the conservatory was not part of any plan. I am sorry it happened that way.”
The library breathed around them.
“So you were using me,” Emily said. “As I was using you.”
He looked at her. “Does that upset you?”
She considered his question honestly. “No,” she said. “Who am I to be upset? I had my own reasons for every step of this. I cannot be angry at you for having yours. You were right. I do have better prospects now than I did before. Whatever else this was, it was that.” She looked at him directly. “I am grateful for it.”
He held her gaze for a moment.
Then she straightened, and something in her manner shifted back to the practical, composed version of herself that he had come to recognize as her armor going back on.
She glanced toward the heavy oak door, her posture stiffening. “You did not need to do this,” she said. “Call me to the library in the middle of a masquerade ball to announce it. It was already obvious after that morning that the courtship was finished. Anyone could have seen us come in here. The risk was entirely unnecessary.”
Theodore looked at her, watching the way her eyes darted toward the shadows and the door. A small, unexpected chuckle escaped him, a dry sound that lacked its usual edge of mockery.
“You are nervous,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she retorted. “I am alone, in a dark library with a gentleman. If you have finished announcing the end of our courtship, then I must go.”
Theodore didn’t move. He remained anchored against the table, as his chuckle faded. Emily held his gaze for only a moment before she turned to leave, but his hand found her wrist as she made the first move.
It was a light thing. Two fingers, no more, curling gently around the inside of her wrist before she had taken a full step, and she stilled immediately. He drew her toward him, slowly, with no particular force behind it, until she was standing in front of him, close enough that she was at his eye level, with him leaning back against the table the way he was.
He released her wrist, but she didn't pull away. She stood there, breathless and silent, her gaze locked onto his.
He looked at her. At the freckles, which the lamplight had found with an almost deliberate quality, were scattered across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks. He had always thought them incongruous. He had said so himself, and he had meant it. They had never seemed to belong on a face so composed, so determined, so thoroughly arranged against any possible softness.
He was finding, increasingly and against his better judgment, that he had been wrong about that.
They suited her. He did not know when exactly that had shifted, only that it had, and that standing here in the low light of a library with her close enough to notice the detail of them, he could not imagine her face without them.
He did not say any of that. “Drop your shoulders,” he said instead.
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your shoulders.” He looked at them, then back at her face. “Drop them.”
She looked at him with furrowed eyebrows. “They are perfectly fine where they are.”
“They are up around your ears,” he said pleasantly. “Drop them.”
He had noticed it recently. He was not certain when it had first registered, only that once it had, he could not un-see it. She carried herself the same way in every room, that straight, considered posture that he had always taken for rigidity, for the particular brand of composure she had built her entire reputation on. But it was not the same in every room. He had seen her with Yvette. He had seen her when she thought nobody was paying attention, and the line of her shoulders then was entirely different from what it was now.
She raised them when she was nervous. He was nearly certain she did not know she did it.
