Page 39 of Duke of Moonstone
She dropped her gaze first. Her cheeks had color in them that had not been there before.
Good. I am not the only one.
The thought arrived before he could stop it, and he crushed it before turning his attention to the window.
Silence lingered between them. It was not the acute silence of their early days, nor was it comfortable. Instead, it was tense, like a string stretched to its breaking point, humming with unspoken things that neither of them was ready to address because doing so would mean having a conversation neither of them wanted.
“You look well this evening,” he said because the silence was becoming dangerous, and he needed to fill it with something that was not the sound of his own pulse.
“Thank you.” She smoothed her glove again. “You look as you always do.”
“And how is that?”
She glanced up. Something moved at the corner of her mouth. “Very proper.”
He almost smiled. Almost. He caught it in time and turned it into a nod instead which was safer. “I shall take that as a compliment.”
“You may take it however you wish.”
The carriage slowed. Through the window, the lights of the Halford residence shone brightly against the evening sky, and Alexander was aware, with a clarity he did not welcome, that he was about to spend an entire evening in public beside this woman and that the dress was going to be a problem. But the way she had looked at him just now was going to be a much bigger one.
He stepped out first and offered his hand.
She took it.
Frances sat beside him at the dinner table, and Alexander told himself, firmly and with conviction, that the dress was no longer a distraction.
This was a lie. The dress was a major distraction. He reached for his wine.
The table was long and well-appointed, set for eighteen. Lord and Lady Halford had assembled the sort of company thatannounced itself—a viscount and his wife, a baron with political ambitions, two members of Parliament, a retired admiral who had seen action at Trafalgar, and an assortment of their wives and relations. Alexander knew most of them. He had dined with half of them before. He knew the shape of the conversation before it began—estates, Parliament, the weather, hunting.
What he did not know, what he had not anticipated, was that his Duchess would open her mouth and rearrange the entire table.
The admiral’s wife, a woman of considerable years and sharp opinions, turned to the Duchess and asked whether she had traveled abroad.
“I have not had that pleasure,” the Duchess said. “Though I have studied several languages. Italian, a little French, and some German.”
“German!” The admiral leaned forward from three seats away. “Whatever for?”
“Because it is beautiful,” she said. “People think it harsh, but that is because they have not heard it spoken well. German poetry, read aloud—there is nothing quite like it.”
“I confess I never thought of German as beautiful,” the baron said.
“Then you have not been listening carefully enough.” She smiled at him. Not the polished, measured smile she wore inAlexander’s drawing room, but something warmer, something with life in it. “Every language carries something particular. Italian has music in its bones. French has precision. German has depth. They are not interchangeable.”
The baron looked at her as though she had said something remarkable which, Alexander conceded privately, she rather had.
I never knew of all that.
He took another sip of wine and watched her over the rim of his glass. The woman who sat beside him at breakfast, spreading cream cheese on scones in pointed silence, was currently holding the attention of half the table, and she was doing it without effort—without strategy, without calculation.
“And music, Your Grace?” The viscount, a man of perhaps forty with an easy manner and rather too much interest in Alexander’s wife, set down his fork and turned toward her. “I understand you are an accomplished musician.”
“I do play the pianoforte,” she said. “Whether that makes me accomplished, I leave to others to judge.”
“False modesty does not suit you,” Alexander said.
She turned to look at him, and her eyes held a spark of surprise that pleased him more than it should have. “I do not think you have ever heard me play.”
