Page 64 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

The carriage lurched forward two lengths and stopped again. Neither of them noticed.

“How old were you when you first kept the household accounts?” he asked.

“Twelve.”

“And how old when anyone thanked you for it?”

Her mouth curved without quite becoming a smile. “They thanked the accounts. They thanked the household running smoothly. They never quite got round to thanking the girl sitting at the desk.”

“I understand better than you may think.” He turned the brim of his hat between his fingers, studying it as though the stitching required his full concentration. “When I was a boy I grew very good at reading a room before I entered it. The set of my father’s shoulders through a doorway. Which footman would not meet my eye. What that promised for the evening.” He set the hat on the seat beside him. “I told myself it was cleverness. It was not cleverness. It was fear.”

The rain intensified. The flower seller abandoned her corner and ducked into a doorway.

“You have never told me that,” Louisa said softly.

“I have never told anyone. It seems we are trading in confidences neither of us can afford to have repeated.” His voice warmed. “You have the more incriminating of the two. I merely learned to flinch at the right moment. You committed forgery before your first Season.”

The laugh broke free of her, startled and graceless, and the air between them shifted by a degree.

“Oliver.” She pressed her gloved fingers against her mouth. “You must not say it like that. It sounds as though I ran a counterfeiting operation from my father’s study.”

“You rather did. A small one. Very exclusive clientele.”

She laughed again. He watched her do it, his expression unreadable.

The dray had been hauled to the curb. The traffic unknotted itself in lurches, and Curzon Street came up grey and rain-slicked before either of them was ready for it. Hargreaves drew the horses to the curb outside her door.

“Thank you,” she said, reaching for the handle. “For the outing. And for not saying what everyone else would say about… everything.”

“There is nothing to say. You were sixteen, and you kept a roof above your family. I should have shaken your hand, not heard your confession.” His gloved fingers closed over hers on the latch, warm through two thicknesses of kid leather. He lifted it for her. “Go in. You are letting the rain into my carriage, and Hargreaves will hold me personally responsible.”

She stepped down into the wet. She did not permit herself to look back until the door had shut behind her. When she turned, the carriage was already moving, and the warmth on her hand where his had rested faded slowly, like the last note of a hymn in an empty church.

* * *

Three evenings later, at Lady Rutherford’s, a soprano was murdering an Italian aria with conviction. Oliver could see Sebastian’s mouth moving, but he was barely aware of the sound leaving his lips.

“You have not heard me,” Sebastian said, swirling the wine in his glass.

“I heard every word.”

“Then repeat the last of them.”

Oliver’s mouth opened. The words were not there. His attention had gone across the drawing room to the cluster of chairs near the pianoforte, where Louisa stood in a gown the color of a winter sky, listening to Frederick Langley describe a horse he intended to buy at Tattersalls, using both hands to demonstrate the importance of the endeavor.

Sebastian followed the line of his gaze without turning his head.

“Ah,” he said simply, and Oliver scowled irritably.

“Do not.”

Sebastian set his glass on the tray of a passing footman. “You searched her out before you greeted Lady Rutherford. Before the hostess, who was standing directly before you with her hand extended and who watched you do it. You have done the same at every gathering for a fortnight. I have been counting.”

“We have an arrangement.”

“That would hold if the room had been watching. It was not. You searched her out the moment you crossed the threshold, when the only person present to observe was yourself.” He paused. “A man performs for an audience. You did that for no audience at all.”

Oliver had no answer ready. Across the room, the soprano reached for a note well above her means and missed it cleanly. Louisa caught his eye. She tilted her head a fraction toward the singer and pressed her lips together against a laugh that was plainly, unmistakably, intended for him. Frederick, at her shoulder, smiled as though the joke belonged to his conversation.