Page 25 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
Theodore smiled. “Your face is a perfectly good place to start.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at her, the smile still in place but something shifting behind it, the way light shifts when a cloud moves across it. “There is something I think you should know,” he said.
Emily looked at him. “What is it?”
“I am not looking for a wife,” he said.
Emily said nothing.
“I want to be clear about that,” he continued. “Whatever Julia has told you, whatever the list suggests, whatever the dance and my gesture may have implied to the people who were watching doesn’t matter.” He held her gaze. “I am not in the market. I have never been in the market, and even if I were...” he paused. “...It would not be a love match.”
He watched her face. Watched for the flicker, the small fracture in the composure that would tell him the words had landed where he intended them to land.
He thought about Alistair. About the evening, two Seasons ago now, when his friend had come to him, ambushed by his own feelings, and did not know what to do with them. Theodore had laughed at him, affectionately, because that was just how he was. He had not taken Alistair seriously. But he recalled that Emily had. She had been the one who had listened, encouraged, and told Alistair that love was worth it. That a love match was the only match worth having.
He had heard her say it himself. Not to him, never to him, but to Yvette at one of the Pembourne dinners, when the women had somehow drifted onto the subject the way women did. She wanted a love marriage.
So, he was counting on his words. On the fact that telling her this was no love match would be enough to send her back to her drawing room and her callers and whatever other options she had available to her, because Emily Pierce did not compromise on things she believed in.
Or so he had thought.
“I do not care about a love match,” Emily said.
Theodore looked at her.
“What?”
“A love match,” she said again, evenly. “I do not require one. I do not expect it from you.”
He studied her face. “You have said, on more than one occasion, that you would not marry someone you do not love.”
“I have said a great many things,” Emily said. “People change their minds.”
“Not about that,” Theodore said. “Not you. You told Alistair that love was the only reason worth —”
“I told Alistair what was true for him at the time,” Emily said. “I meant it. He needed to hear it, and it was true.” She paused. “That was then.”
“What about now?”
She looked at him directly, without flinching. “Now I need a husband,” she said. “A practical one. A powerful one. You saidyou are not looking for a wife. I am not asking you to look. I am asking you to consider what is already in front of you.”
Theodore looked at her for a long moment.
She was lying. Not about the practicality, not about needing a husband, those parts were true, and he could see that plainly. But something else was sitting behind her eyes, something she had packed carefully away before he arrived, and what she was showing him now was not the whole of it.
He knew it the way he knew most things about people, not from what they said but from the particular quality of how they said it. Emily was giving him the version of herself she had decided he should have. The practical, unsentimental, clear-eyed version.
It did not fit her any better than the freckles fit her person.
“You do not mean that,” he said quietly.
“I mean every word of it,” she said.
“You mean the words,” he said. “I am less certain you mean what is behind them.”
“You are deflecting, Your Grace.”
“I am confused,” he said, honestly. He truly couldn’t understand what was happening. “You are confusing me.”
Emily straightened and looked at him. “Court me,” she said.
