Page 26 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“I do not claim any expertise,” Louisa managed.

“No, you clearly do not. Which is precisely why your opinion is worth hearing. The experts have been telling each other how marvelous this painting is for a week. Not one of them noticed that Dido looks like she is waiting for a fitting at the modiste.” Lady Fitzwilliam smiled. “You must call on me, my dear. I hold a salon on Thursdays.”

The group resumed their discussion, but the atmosphere had changed. The stout gentleman was reconsidering the painting with furrowed brows. Two younger ladies whispered to each other, their gazes darting between the canvas and Louisa. Oliver stood beside her with his arms still crossed, saying nothing.

When the crowd shifted and they stepped back, Louisa’s hands were trembling. She pressed them flat against her skirts.

“You did that on purpose,” she accused him at once.

“I did.”

“You provoked me into arguing with you in front of six strangers.”

“I provoked you into saying what you already believed. The arguing was incidental.” He tilted his head. The afternoon light carved shadows beneath his cheekbones. “Tell me you did not enjoy it.”

She opened her mouth to deny it. The denial stalled somewhere behind her teeth because it was false, because the rush still prickled along her skin, because for thirty seconds she had stood in front of a crowd, said exactly what she meant.

“That is what I thought,” Oliver said.

They walked. The exhibition stretched through a series of connected rooms, each hung floor to ceiling with paintings. Louisa felt lighter than she had in months, as though the weight she carried through every social gathering had been lifted by an inch, shifted, made manageable.

Oliver walked beside her without speaking. She was aware of him at her shoulder, the height of him, the steady pace of his stride, the way other visitors glanced at him with curiosity that he did not acknowledge. He stopped before a small landscape, barely larger than a book, hung at knee height where nobody would notice it.

“That one,” he said.

Louisa crouched slightly. A country lane in early morning. Mist rising from a field. A dog standing at a gate, looking back over its shoulder as though waiting for someone who had fallen behind.

“It is lovely.”

“It is the best painting in the room. And nobody will look at it because it is hung six inches from the floor beneath a canvas the size of a dining table.” He looked at her. “Some things are positioned badly. That does not diminish their worth.”

His voice was far too warm, too kind, to be speaking about just a painting. She straightened, her cheeks warm.

“You are very free with your metaphors today, Your Grace.”

“Oliver.”

“Your Grace.”

He smiled. She did not return it, but she felt it, the tug at the corner of her mouth, the warmth that spread through her chest like ink through water.

“You realize,” he said, “that you did not need me today. I gave you a push. The rest was entirely yours.”

“That is generous.”

“It is accurate. I did not put those thoughts about Dido in your head. I did not teach you about Turner or perspective or the proper rendering of a queen. All of that was already there, Louisa. It has always been there. You merely needed someone to tell you the room was ready to hear it.”

Warmth rose to her cheeks.

“You… are not your reputation,” she got out, and his brows shot toward his hairline.

“My reputation?”

She pushed forward through a dry throat. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” she managed to get out. “It is just… that people do not speak about your kindness much.”

“My kindness?”

She nodded bravely. “Indeed, you have been kind to me. More than most.”