Page 34 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“I’ll miss it.” She stayed where she was, in the doorway, the cold finding its way through the thin drape of her costume. “It’s the piano, isn’t it?”
“The room was warm,” he said. “A trifling?—”
“You left as soon as it began.”
He said nothing.
“I’ve watched you leave before.” She came one step further onto the balcony. “I didn’t connect it at first, but tonight… I realized. You leave each time a piano begins.” She kept her tone even; she wasn’t accusing him, only observing. “You don’t need to lie to me, Your Grace.”
“Lady Annabelle?—”
“You have grief,” she said.
He looked at her.
“That is what it looks like. I’m not guessing. That is grief. Old grief. And I think it has been there a great deal longer than anyone has been permitted to notice.”
“You don’t know what you’re—” He stopped. His jaw worked once. “You know nothing about it.”
“I came because you left and your face was—” She stopped herself on the edge of the word she’d been going to use, chose a more honest one. “Wrong. Your face was wrong, and you were alone.”
“I required a moment of air,” he said, and the words came out clipped, pointed, aimed at ending the conversation. “Nothing more. And you should not be out here. It is not?—”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
He went still.
“Whatever this is.” She gestured briefly, indicating the set of his shoulders, the controlled quiet of his voice, all of it. “The dangerous duke. The man to be kept at a distance. I have spent the better part of a month in regular company with a six-year-old who notices your inconsistencies without blinking. I think I can manage the full version.”
He took a step toward her, and the space between them narrowed.
“You are supposed to be afraid of me,” he said, low, and there was nothing practiced in it.
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
“It isn’t,” she said, and held his gaze. “A man worth fearing doesn’t count every dance on a woman’s card. Doesn’t threaten men quietly so they won’t frighten her. Doesn’t?—”
She stopped, because she was getting further into the sentence than she had intended when she started it.
He was very close now. She had not moved. The rail was at her back.
“James wants honesty from you,” she said, and she did not know entirely why she reached for it here, except that it was true and true things were what she had. “He wants you to be present with him. Not managing him, not maintaining distance from him…he just wants youpresent. And you give him everything except that, and it is the only thing he wants.” She looked up at him. “And you are doing it now too. You are standing two feet away from me and you are already somewhere else.”
Dominic looked at her for a long moment. The vine leaves had shifted slightly in the night air. His mask sat below the level of his eyes, and his eyes gave her nothing prepared.
“Curious little bird,” he said, and his voice had come down into a register she felt rather than heard. “Always looking for the place where the wall begins.” His gaze moved across her face without hurry, and she found she could not look away from it, which she noted and could do nothing about. “Tell me.” He tilted his head fractionally. “Did you come out here to check on me?” He let a beat pass. “Or did you want to be alone with me?”
Her face burned suddenly. “I… I came because you?—”
“Out here,” he said. “Empty balcony. Cold. Two hundred people on the other side of that door, your chaperone among them.” He watched her. “And you followed.”
“I was…” She trailed off because the word she had reached for wasconcerned, and it was accurate, but it’d taken on a quality she hadn’t assigned it, standing here, and she was not entirely willing to defend it.
His hands settled at her waist, and a gasp escaped her lips. She had not seen him move. The warmth of his hands went through the thin drape of her costume, and she forgot what she had been going to say.
“What if I were to put my hands right here,” he said, even though they were already there, “and feel your back arch against the cold railing?”
