Page 34 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“You do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Make people feel heard. You ask Lord Williston about his horses. You ask Mrs. Beckwith about her garden. You remember the names of people’s children. Everyone walks away from you feeling as though they are the most fascinating person in the room.”

“That is the method. I am simply better practiced.”

“It is not a method.” She looked at him steadily. “I believe you genuinely care what people have to say.”

The observation caught him off-balance. He covered it with a half-smile. “A dangerous accusation. You will ruin my reputation as a shallow, charming wastrel.”

“Your reputation is safe. Nobody who watches you charm a room would suspect you of sincerity.” She paused. “I would not have suspected it, either, if I had not been paying close attention.”

The breeze shifted. He caught the scent of rosewater from her hair, faint beneath the green smell of the park. Her eyes held his, grey-blue in the dappled light, steady in a way she rarely was when Frederick’s name entered the conversation.

He looked away first.

“The principle is simple,” he said, redirecting them both. “Ask questions that require more than a yes or no answer. Follow the answers. Build the next question on what they have just told you, so they feel the conversation is a bridge rather than a series of disconnected rooms.” He stopped walking. They had reached a bend in the path where a wrought-iron bench faced the Serpentine. Two swans drifted near the far bank, white against the dark water. “I have a challenge for you.”

“I do not like challenges.”

“You like them enormously. You simply prefer to pretend otherwise.” He nodded toward a cluster of figures standing near the boathouse. “Do you see the gentleman in the brown coat? Beside the tall woman with the green parasol?”

Louisa squinted. “I see him.”

“Do you know him?”

“I have never seen him before.”

“Excellent. I would like you to walk over there, introduce yourself, and hold a conversation with him for ten minutes.”

Her face drained of color. “You cannot be serious.”

“Ten minutes. Ask him questions. Follow his answers. Do not prepare a script. Do not rehearse. Trust that you are interesting enough to keep a stranger talking, because you are.”

“Oliver, I cannot simply walk up to a man I have never met and begin a conversation.”

“You collided with me at the Bancroft ball. That went rather well.” He stepped closer. Close enough that his shadow fell across the brim of her bonnet. “You spoke about Carthage in front of six strangers. You held your own through three dances at a Thornbury ball. A ten-minute conversation in Hyde Park is well within your range.”

“Those situations were different. You were beside me.”

“I will be beside you now. Twelve feet away, on that bench, pretending to admire the swans.”

“Swans are vicious creatures. No one genuinely admires them.”

“Then I shall be twelve feet away pretending to admire vicious creatures. Go.”

“It is entirely improper!”

“It is not.”

She stared at him. Her fingers worried the handle of the parasol. He watched her measure the distance to the boathouse, calculate the odds, assemble the familiar architecture of retreat.

Then she straightened her shoulders. She closed the parasol with a decisive snap and handed it to him.

“Hold this.”

“With pleasure.”