Page 29 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“You assume a great deal about what I require.”
“I make observations about what you are.” He looked at her. “Which is not a woman who will be content in a pleasant,comfortable marriage to a man who runs out of things to say before the weather does.”
She almost laughed. She did not. “You are genuinely aggravating.”
“I have been told.”
“You said it was not a compliment when I told you I was forthright.”
“It isn’t one now, either.” The corner of his mouth moved, a small, controlled thing, there and gone.
Lord Keldwick murmured something about finding Collingsworth on the opposite side of the room and removed himself with great discretion.
The room’s noise continued around them: glasses, voices, the scrape of chairs from the supper room. Lady Rosenhall had found an acquaintance and was deep in conversation. Helena was watching Annabelle with the carefully neutral expression she wore when she was being very interested.
Annabelle turned back to Dominic. “Your Grace,” she began gently. “About James…”
He raised an eyebrow, stiffening. “Yes?”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” she said, lowering her voice. “I mean it.” She looked at the floor between them, then back up. “I only wish you could tell him something true. Even a small piece of it. He won’t press for more than you give. He never does.”
Dominic had his glass in his hand. His thumb pressed once against its base. He was looking at a point past her shoulder, and his jaw had the set it got when he was holding something at a distance, and she had learned enough by now to know the difference between that and indifference.
“I understand why you’re fond of him,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“What you’re asking isn’t that simple.” His voice was level, devoid of ice.
She had learned to make that distinction with him. He was not dismissing her right then. He was simply telling her the truth, and the truth had a cost she could see in the line of his jaw and not hear in the words.
She held his gaze. “I’m not asking for an explanation. I only want him to have something true. He won’t press for more than you give. He never does…That’s all,” she said.
He turned his glass once in his hand and looked at her then, and since he did not look away, neither did she, and the noise of theroom continued around them as though it were happening at a considerable remove.
The moment might have stretched past usefulness and into something unexplored, but Lord Keldwick reappeared from nowhere with Collingsworth and a question about Tuesday’s vote in the Lords, and Dominic straightened, and the conversation became something else.
Annabelle moved back toward Helena, who had been talking to Lady Rosenhall about absolutely nothing with great animation.
And Dominic turned back to Lord Keldwick and Collingsworth.
Chapter Nine
“Your spear,” Helena said, “is going to cause an incident.”
Annabelle adjusted her grip on the thing. It was decorative, gilt-painted wood with a blunted end, which had seemed considerably more manageable in the mirror of her bedchamber than it was proving to be in a room containing two hundred people and a full orchestra.
“It is part of the costume,” she said.
“It is part of the costume that is currently within six inches of Lord Brentwood’s wig.” Helena stepped sideways, pulling Annabelle with her. “I am quite certain Athena was wise enough to put the spear down at parties.”
Annabelle propped it against the nearest pillar and let it stay there.
The Greyton masquerade was one of the season’s more anticipated events, and the house was dressed for it: every chandelier lit, the floors cleared for dancing, and the assembled company arrayed in the creative and occasionally baffling interpretations of classical antiquity that such evenings reliably produced.
There were three Cleopatras she could identify, all wearing the same shade of gold, and a man in a toga of unclear allegiance who had nodded to her on the way in.
Annabelle wore grey and silver, a draped sash over her gown, an owl in silver filigree pinned at her shoulder, and an olive wreath above her half-mask. Helena had called it very striking; Lady Rosenhall had called it unusual.
