Page 46 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
She turned to face the path that led out, back toward the afternoon, the other guests, the noise already swelling as the first of the other teams rounded the corner and burst into the clearing, breathless and flushed.
"Miss Norish."
She turned.
He held her gaze with everything he had not said and would not say yet, not here, not now, not in the center of a hedge maze."You are not alone in this."
On impulse, he placed both palms on her shoulders, which caused her to look up at him for one moment. He watched her take it in, and hold it, and then draw herself up to her full height, which was not very great but was entirely sufficient for the woman inside it.
"Thank you, Your Grace," she said quietly.
She was aware, distantly, of voices around the corner of the hedge. She was aware that her face was against the lapel of the Duke of Pridewell's coat, that his hand was at her back, and that the voices were getting closer.
She stepped back. But it was too late.
The clearing filled with noise, people, and the ordinary business of the afternoon.
The Marquess of Thynne came first. He rounded the left-hand path at speed, his companion half a step behind, both of them flushed with the momentum of people who had been moving fast and were not yet ready to stop. Anthony pulled up short when he saw them. His eyes moved from Leander to Julia, taking in the distance between them, which was now appropriate, and then to the space that had very recently not been appropriate, and which a man of Anthony's particular attentiveness would have no difficulty reconstructing.
He said nothing. He did not need to say a word. The woman beside him drew a small, sharp breath that communicated everything a full sentence would have and turned to murmur something to the pair arriving behind her from the right-hand path.
Leander watched it travel. That was the thing about a gathering of this size in a space this contained —information did not walk, it ran. Within thirty seconds, the two young lords from Northamptonshire had received it, passed it to the woman between them, and that woman had fixed her gaze on Julia with the bright, avid attention of someone storing something for later use.
He noted each face. Filed them.
Poppy Norish arrived from the far path on Lord Blackwell's arm, and she read the clearing the way someone reads a room whenthey have spent a lifetime watching a sharp-eyed person do it first. Her face went pale. Blackwell steadied her without being asked, which Leander approved of distantly.
The murmur moved through the group in the particular key of polite Society caught between scandal and the performance of not having noticed one. Voices kept themselves low. Eyes did not.
He looked at Julia.
She was standing exactly where she had been. Chin level. Hands still. She was looking at nothing in particular, which told him she was looking at everything at once, running some internal calculation at a speed he suspected most people in the clearing would not have managed in twice the time. He had seen that look before. He had seen it on Aldgate Street, when she was assessing a broken carriage and an impossible situation, and deciding what came next.
He watched her face for the space of several seconds and read, in the precise economy of her expression, the answer to which she was arriving. It was not a happy answer. It was a practical one, which was worse.
He made his decision.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
His voice carried without effort. It always had. Rooms had always gone quiet for him, which was not something he had ever worked at but had found useful often enough to be grateful for. This clearing went quiet now, the murmurs pulling back like a tide.
He let the silence hold for one moment.
"Miss Julia Norish has done me the very great honor of agreeing to become my wife."
Nobody moved immediately. Then several people moved at once, the way a room reordered itself when something had landed that changed the shape of everything else. Exclamations, the rapid renegotiation of whispers into congratulations, the sound of a situation recategorizing itself from scandal to announcement.
He was watching Julia.
The calculation behind her eyes cleared. Something came through in its place that he thought she did not try extremely hard to conceal.
Relief, he thought first. Then he looked again and revised it. It was not relief exactly because relief implied she had been afraid, and she was not the kind of woman who admitted to fear. It was something closer to the expression of a person who had been standing braced against a door, holding it shut through sheer will, and had suddenly discovered that whatever was on the other side had walked away.
It was a warmth that began at the corners of her eyes and moved, briefly and involuntarily, across her whole face. Not the careful smile she used for rooms. Something underneath it, unguarded and quick, the expression of someone who had been braced for one thing and received something entirely other.
She composed herself within seconds. The careful smile followed, exactly right for the occasion. But he had seen what came before it.
He found that he did not mind having caught her in that unguarded half-second of something genuine before the composure returned. Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with their arrangement. It had been for him specifically, and he was aware that catching her in that moment gave him more pleasure than he had felt in a long time.
