Page 58 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
The door handle moved.
“You should not be out here alone,” Dominic said.
She had known it was him before he spoke. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll go back.”
“I won’t keep you.” He closed the glass door, and the sound of the room fell away. He stopped at the edge of the light, hands behind his back, the formal distance intact. “I only wanted to say—you played beautifully.”
She had braced for irony, for the armored version. This was neither. He had simply spoken the unvarnished truth as he felt it.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I mean it.” He insisted, continuing his approach, one measured step at a time.
“I know.” She held his gaze. “I thought you would leave when Harcroft asked you.”
“I’ve left every room with a piano in it for the better part of twenty years. The sound…the sound finds something, and stays there.” He looked at the path between them. “Tonight… it didn’t. Your playing.” He stopped. “It was different. I don’t have a better word for it.”
She studied his face in the window light: the line of his jaw, the way he was looking at the stone path rather than at her, and the steadiness it cost him not to look.
“I’m glad,” she said.
He looked up then. He held it for a moment and then seemed to recollect himself, because he straightened slightly. “Have you settled on anyone? Tonight. Hartwell?—”
Annabelle looked away swiftly, her cheeks heating as she considered the view below. “Oh…Hartwell…well, he’s… he is very good company.”
Dominic hummed and, as if he couldn’t help himself, he said, “He reads. His consignment losses in Bristol?—”
At that jab, Annabelle turned to level a glare at the shameless Duke standing beside her. “He told me about the consignments himself.”
Dominic’s mouth curved as he continued, “He told you what he tells people in drawing rooms.”
Annabelle harrumphed and said, grumpily, “Lord Ainsley’s hands wander.”
“They wander, and his accounts are worse.” He paused and then added with far too much cheek, “I had a report.”
She looked at him.
“For Ainsley.”
She waited.
“And Hartwell,” he said.
“Dominic. You offered to help me find a husband. What you have done since the start of this season is ensure that no one gets close enough to try.” She stepped forward, because she was not having this conversation at party distance. “You are keeping me from a husband while… While expressing far more interest than a family friend does. I would like you to tell me which part of that you believe is fair.”
He was looking at her with the expression she had first seen on a balcony at Lucien’s masquerade, the one stripped of all composure even as he struggled to hold on to the ghost of it.
“I’m keeping my end of the bargain,” he said. “You’re Lucien’s sister, you deserve to marry well?—”
“Is that all I am to you?” Her voice broke. “Lucien’s sister? James’s piano teacher?” She took another step, closing the distance to six feet. “Is that what you were thinking when you stood at the back of that room and watched me play?”
He went still and, in that moment, found that all his defenses had been stripped absolutely bare by those questions thrown at him. He did not know when he opened it, but when he did, the word that came out of it was, “No. No, that is not…that is not what you are to me.”
Annabelle swallowed, unwilling to look away as she pushed, asking, “Then what?”
He crossed the remaining distance, stopping close enough that she had to look up at him, and his face in the half-light of the garden was not controlled.
“The truth,” he said, “is that I have spent every week since James barged into your house convincing myself that… That there is some version of this in which I can feel and still be a man who hasn’t ruined everything.” His voice was low enough that the garden held it. “I’ve stood in your doorway and told myself it was duty. I’ve watched several men talk to you this season and deluded myself into thinking it diligence. But the truth…the truth is that I…”
