Page 31 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
She was not jealous. She was simply annoyed at the impertinence of the approach. That was all it was. That was entirely all it was.
She looked at Euphemia, at the composure and the wide, uncertain eyes, and felt the annoyance soften before she had quite decided to let it. She knew her story. She knew, in broad strokes at least, what this young woman's life had been. Her parents and their awful demise. The reclusive aunt and the years hidden away in the countryside. The late debut and the season she had been thrown into, like someone pushed into deep water and told to swim.
Now there she was, positioning herself at a ball, delivering little speeches to her competition, because someone might have told her... or she had decided that this was how it was done. This was the game, and these were the moves, and she was going to make them properly.
“May I ask?” Emily said, and her voice had lost whatever edge it might have briefly carried. “Is there a particular reason you are in such a hurry? To secure a match, I mean.”
Euphemia raised her brows for a short moment and then swallowed. “I really must be going,” she said. “I was invited last minute but I cannot stay long. My sisters are expecting me.”
She began to turn.
“Miss Euphemia.” Emily took one small step forward. “Why do they call you and your sisters... the Byron sisters?”
Euphemia stilled.
“You are not related,” Emily continued, gently. “You have different surnames. Different fathers, yet you call yourselves sisters, and you call yourselves Byron.” She tilted her head. “Where did that come from?”
Euphemia looked at her for a long moment. Something passed through those wide blue eyes, something that was layered and old and not at all what Emily had expected to find there.
Then she curtsied and walked away without a word.
Emily stood where she was and watched her go. Watched the gold of her hair disappear into the crowd, the straight careful line of her back, the way she moved like someone who had learned to take up exactly as much space as was necessary and not a fraction more.
She wanted to know her. There was something in that face, beneath the rehearsed composure and the darting eyes, that suggested a person who had a great deal to say and had simply never been given a room safe enough to say it in.
She was still thinking about it, still turning the Byron question over in her mind like a smooth stone, when a hand settled at the small of her back.
“You have that look,” Theodore said, somewhere near her ear.
Emily came back to the room in one breath.
“What look?” she asked.
“The one where you are thinking about something you have no intention of telling me.” His hand was still at her waist. He had not moved it. She was aware of this in the way one is aware of a fire in a room, not looking directly at it but feeling its warmth regardless. “Who was that?”
“Nobody of consequence,” she answered.
“You watched her walk away for quite a long time for someone of no consequence.”
Emily turned slightly to look at him. He was closer than she had realized, close enough that turning brought her face near his shoulder, and she had to tilt her chin upward to meet his eyes. He looked, as he always looked, entirely comfortable in his own existence.
She straightened. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough,” he said pleasantly.
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the answer you are getting.” His hand shifted slightly at her waist, not moving away, just settling differently, and she felt it travel all the way up her spine before she had the presence of mind to attribute it to irritation and leave it there.
“We are pretending, Emily. Remember?” he said to her. “Relax your shoulders. You do not have to look so uncomfortable.”
Emily looked at him. “You do not need to practice on me when there is nobody watching.”
“Who says nobody is watching?”
She glanced around the room. He was not wrong. Several pairs of eyes had found them with the assessing interest of people who had heard the rumor and were looking for evidence of it.
She turned back to him and smiled. It was a good smile. Warm and natural and entirely constructed. “Then perhaps you should say something amusing,” she said, through it. “So we look like two people who are enjoying each other's company.”
