Page 65 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“How long?” Sebastian asked.

Oliver did not pretend to misunderstand. “It is not what you think.”

“It is exactly what I think. The question is not what I think. The question is what you intend to do when Langley proposes, and you lose the privilege of looking for her at all.”

“She wants Frederick. She has wanted him for years.”

“She wanted the idea of Frederick for years. What she wants now is a different question entirely, and you are too busy pretending the answer does not concern you to notice that it has changed.”

Oliver drank his wine. Across the room, Frederick was touching Louisa’s elbow, guiding her toward the supper table with proprietary ease. She went. She smiled at Frederick. She said a word Oliver could not hear, and Frederick laughed and pulled out her chair.

She looked up, and across thirty feet of candlelit drawing room, past the soprano and the chattering guests and Frederick’s hand resting beside her plate, her eyes found Oliver’s.

She held them for three full seconds. The expression on her face was not a smile. It was not a question. It was recognition, plain and involuntary, the way a head turns toward a familiar voice in a crowd before the mind has granted permission, before the question of why that voice matters more than every other has even been asked.

Then Frederick leaned toward her and said a remark, and she turned to him, and the thread between them all but vanished.

Oliver looked at Sebastian and found his friend watching him steadily.

“You are going to tell me to be careful,” Oliver relented with a sigh.

“I am going to tell you that it is too late to be careful.” Sebastian picked up his glass from the footman’s returning tray. “What I am going to ask is whether you are prepared to be honest. With her. With yourself. Because this arrangement of yours was built to protect you both from the wrong people, and I am watching it fail in the only direction that matters.”

The soprano finished her aria. The room erupted in applause. Oliver clapped with everyone else, his hands moving without instruction, his gaze already drifting back toward the supper table where Louisa sat with the man she had spent four years wanting, while the man she had not yet thought to want stood thirty feet away, clapping for a song neither of them had heard.

CHAPTER 19

“My husband kissed me on our wedding night, and I spent the entire carriage ride home wondering whether his valet had fed him raw onion as a practical joke.”

Lady Caldwell said this rather suddenly, her voice ringing out clearly. The drawing room at Lady Ashton’s received it with the collective gasp and immediate laughter of six women who had been drinking sherry since half past nine.

Oliver should not have been listening. He was standing in the corridor outside the drawing room, waiting for Sebastian, who had gone to retrieve a book Lord Ashton had promised him and was taking an unreasonable amount of time about it. The door was ajar. The ladies had gathered after supper while the gentlemen lingered over port, and by the time Oliver had passed on his way to find Sebastian, the conversation had progressed well beyond any territory a gentleman ought to overhear.

He should have walked on. He knew this. Instead he stood with his shoulder against the wall and his glass in his hand, because Lady Caldwell had just said the word kiss, and Louisa was in that room, and the combination of those two facts had rooted him to the floorboards.

“You are too cruel, Lady Caldwell.” That was Mrs. Fenton, her voice warm with sherry and amusement. “Lord Caldwell is a perfectly agreeable man.”

“Lord Caldwell is an excellent man. I would lay down my life for Lord Caldwell. But he kissed like a trout surfacing for a fly, and I refuse to pretend otherwise at this stage of my earthly existence.”

More laughter. Oliver pressed his glass against his mouth to stop his own from escaping.

“What about you, Mrs. Fenton?” Lady Caldwell carried the dangerous brightness of a woman who had decided the evening required confessions. “Your Mr. Fenton. Was the first kiss everything the poets promised?”

“Mr. Fenton kissed me behind my father’s stable when I was nineteen. It was brief, competent, and he tasted of peppermint, which I found considerably more romantic than onion.”

“A low bar, and yet he cleared it. Well done, Mr. Fenton.” Lady Caldwell’s sherry glass clinked against the table.

Laughter again, warmer this time, protective, pulling the moment away from exposure and folding it into the shared humor of the evening. The conversation turned toward safer ground.

Sebastian appeared at the far end of the corridor, book in hand, and paused when he saw Oliver standing motionless beside a closed door.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you.”

Sebastian looked at the door, then at Oliver, then at the door again.

“The ladies are in that room,” he observed.