Page 9 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“You do not think I am handsome?” he said at last.
“I just said you were,” Emily said serenely.
“I don’t like how you said it.”
Emily’s eyebrows furrowed slightly. “Then I apologize.”
He narrowed his eyes. She smiled back at him with all the warmth she possessed and none of the satisfaction she felt, and watched him recalibrate. She could see it happening. He had expected resistance, a stiffened spine, a clipped word, the particular frostiness she reserved almost exclusively for him.
He did not like it. She could tell he did not like it, which meant, naturally, that she intended to keep doing it indefinitely.
“You know,” Theodore said, his voice dropping again, shifting into a different register. “I have always thought you held yourself rather too tightly, Lady Emily. All this...” he gestured vaguely at her general composure. “...decorum. Propriety. Does it not exhaust you?”
“Not in the least,” she said. “I find it rather restful.”
“You should let loose occasionally. Breathe a little.”
“I breathe quite regularly, thank you.”
“I meant —”
“I know what you meant, Your Grace.”
He smiled. Slowly. “Do you?”
“Are you two acquainted?” Julia chimed in, slightly startling Emily, who was just on the verge of losing all composure.
“Vaguely,” Emily said.
“Intimately,” Theodore said, at precisely the same moment.
They looked at each other.
“Vaguely,” Theodore amended, with great pleasantness.
Julia looked at him. Then at Emily. Then back at him. “Right,” she said slowly, in the tone that signified she was filing something she noted in their response away for later.
“We have met a couple of times, Lady Birks. But we barely know each other.” Emily glanced at Theodore. “As you know, His Grace is a good friend of the Duke of Pembourne. So we have been introduced to each other.”
“Introduced,” Theodore repeated. “Yes. I suppose that is one way to describe it.”
Emily looked at him. “Is there another?”
“I simply recall our introductions being rather more...” he paused, as though searching for the word. “...eventful than the term suggests.”
“I cannot imagine what you mean.”
“Can you not?”
“No,” Emily said pleasantly. “I genuinely cannot.”
Theodore smiled. It was the smile of someone sitting on a very good hand of cards. “Lady Birks,” he said, turning to his godmother without taking his eyes off Emily. “Did you know that Lady Emily once told me, at Lord Pembourne's dinner table, that she had met lapdogs with more self-awareness than me?”
Julia blinked. “Did she?”
“She did,” Theodore said. “Entirely unprovoked.”
“It was not unprovoked,” Emily said.
