Page 70 of Duke of Moonstone
At that moment, he was hit with a clarity that unsettled him that he was standing at the edge of something he did not know how to stop.
CHAPTER 25
“Well,” Lavinia said, the moment they were out on the terrace and alone, “that was something.”
Frances walked to the stone balustrade and placed both hands on it. The night air was cool against her flushed skin. Inside, the pianoforte had started up again—someone playing something light and quick—and through the glass, she could see Emily and Sophia bent over what appeared to be a picture book, their heads close together.
“It was a dance,” Frances said. “People dance at dinner parties. It is rather the point of them.”
“Frances.”
“It is a perfectly ordinary activity.”
“Frances Pembroke.”
“Do not use my full name as though I am twelve years old.”
Lavinia came to stand beside her at the balustrade. She was quiet for a moment. That specific, dangerous quiet that Frances had known since childhood—the quiet that meant Lavinia had seen everything, remembered everything, and was simply waiting for the confession to come on its own.
Frances stared at the garden. The moon was high. The roses along the far wall were silver in the light, and somewhere below them a fountain murmured.
“He claimed the dance,” Lavinia said. “Stepped forward and claimed it before Sappherton could finish asking.”
“I am aware. I was there.”
“You were more than there. You were flushed to your collarbone.”
Frances’s hands tightened on the stone. “It was warm in the drawing room.”
“It was notthatwarm.”
The silence stretched between them. Not the sharp kind. The kind that sisters made—full of things already understood, waiting only to be spoken aloud.
Frances closed her eyes.Say it. Just say it and have done with it.
“I have feelings for him,” she said. The words came out flat. Quiet. As though by stripping them of any inflection, she could also strip them of their power. “I have been trying very hard not to, and I have failed, and I wish—I wish very much that I did not.”
Lavinia said nothing. She waited.
“It does not matter,” Frances continued. She opened her eyes and stared at the roses. “It will not become what you are thinking. He is not... He does not...” She stopped. Tried again. “Our marriage is an arrangement. He made that plain from the beginning. Two months, and then we go our separate ways. Love was never part of the terms.”
“Terms?” Lavinia repeated.
“Yes. Terms. We have them. They are very clear.”
“And yet he crossed a drawing room to claim a dance with you in front of every person present.”
Frances turned to her sister. “That is precisely the problem.”
Lavinia tilted her head. Waiting.
“In company, he is... You have seen him. Controlled. Correct. Impossible to read. He says what is expected and nothing more. He manages every conversation as if it were a parliamentary debate, and you could spend an entire evening beside him and leave knowing less about him than when you sat down.” Frances took a breath. “But in private, there are these... moments. Small things. The way he watches me when he thinks I am not looking. The way he has started to sit with Emily in the evenings, telling her about pyramids and temples and things he has no real reason to know about except that he learned them for her sake.”
Her voice caught. She pressed on.
“And tonight...” Frances said. “The way he looked at me. As though I were the only person in that room, and he could not quite believe I was there.” She gripped the balustrade. “Those moments are the problem, Lavinia. Because they make me believe there is something real beneath all that discipline and control, and if I believe that—if I let myself believe that—I will lose my heart to a man who has never once offered his in return.”
“Perhaps he does not know how to offer it.”
