Page 66 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Oliver pushed off the wall and walked toward Sebastian with a stride that was, by any reasonable measure, too fast for a corridor. “Have you got the book?”

“Indeed.” Sebastian fell into step beside him. “I have also got the distinct impression that you heard a thing you were not intended to hear, and that it has rearranged the furniture in your skull.”

Oliver did not answer. They returned to the dining room, where Lord Ashton was holding forth on drainage to a diminishing audience. Oliver sat. He poured more port.

* * *

Four days later, Oliver walked through the garden at Ashford House with Louisa beside him, and the words were still lodged beneath his sternum.

The borders along the south wall blazed with foxgloves and delphiniums, and the bees moved between them with the single-minded industry of creatures unburdened by self-awareness. Louisa walked with her bonnet pushed back and her shawl trailing from one hand, pointing at plants and asking the names of those she did not recognize.

“That is a peony,” she said, stopping beside a bloom the size of a soup bowl.

“That is a rose.”

She shook her head. “It cannot be. It is enormous.”

“It is a Damask. Mrs. Aldridge guards them with the ferocity she applies to her cabbages. I am permitted to admire them from a distance of no fewer than three feet.”

Louisa laughed. She had been laughing more freely since Wiltshire.

“I must tell you,” she said, trailing her fingers above a lavender spike without quite touching it, “that Lady Caldwell’s conversation the other evening has stayed with me.”

Oliver’s stride shortened by half a pace. “Which conversation?”

“You know precisely which conversation.” She glanced sideways at him. “The kissing conversation. I saw your shadow beneath the door, Oliver. You were listening.”

She stopped walking. They stood beside a stone urn overflowing with trailing geraniums, red and insistent against the grey Portland stone. The garden wall behind them held the afternoon heat and radiated it back into the air between them.

“I have been thinking about it,” she said. “I am twenty-two years old. Frederick is very likely going to propose before the end of this Season. And I have no idea what a kiss is meant to feel like.”

Oliver swallowed wrong and covered it with a cough that convinced neither of them.

“You will find out,” he said, aiming for lightness and landing closer to strangled. “When the moment arrives.”

“That is what everyone says. When the moment arrives. As though the moment is a public coach that will collect me on schedule regardless of whether I have packed.” She sat on the edge of the stone urn. A geranium petal drifted onto her shoulder. “I am not afraid of the kiss itself. I am afraid of not knowing whether it is right. I will have nothing to measure it against.”

“You are overthinking this,” he strangled out.

“I overthink everything. You have told me so yourself.” She pulled the geranium petal from her shoulder and turned it between her thumb and forefinger. “You have kissed women before.”

“I am not discussing this.”

“Is it different each time? Or is it always the same?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. She sat on the edge of the urn with a petal in her fingers and waited for him to answer a question that had no answer he could safely give.

“It is different,” he said. “Every time.”

She nodded. She dropped the petal into the gravel and stood, brushing her skirt. “Thank you. I was curious.” She smiled, bright and uncomplicated, and asked about his plans for the rose border, and they walked the rest of the garden discussing Mrs. Aldridge’s vendetta against the rabbits, and by the time her carriage arrived Oliver had almost persuaded himself that the exchange had been unremarkable.

He persuaded himself through dinner, even attempted to read a chapter or two of a book. Then the persuasion failed, and what remained was the image of her on that stone urn with a petal on her shoulder, telling him she had never been kissed, and the understanding, quiet and absolute, that he wanted to be the one who changed that.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

This was not the arrangement. This was not commerce, or strategy, or the careful, transactional bargain they had struck in Hyde Park with a handshake and mended gloves. He was lying in the dark wanting to kiss a woman who trusted him entirely, who called him a friend, who was moving toward another man’s arms.

He turned onto his side. The elm outside the window threw its shifting shadow across the ceiling, the same pattern it had cast when he was nine years old, lying in this bed, making promises he had believed were unbreakable.