Page 72 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Eleanor did not laugh. She turned toward the window, and Louisa watched her profile against the passing streetlamps, the set of her mouth, the careful stillness she held when she was deciding how much truth to spend.

“I am going to ask you a question,” Eleanor said, still looking at the glass. “And I need you not to answer with what you have rehearsed.”

The carriage turned onto Curzon Street. The wheels found the cobbles and steadied.

“Do you still want Frederick?” Eleanor faced her. “Or have you spent so many years wanting him that you no longer know how to let the dream go?”

The question landed in the dark of the carriage, and Louisa felt it settle against her ribs beside the weight she had been carrying since the library, since Oliver’s mouth on hers, since the three days of sleeplessness and the four-minute call and the careful, ruinous distance he had placed between them.

She opened her mouth.

Eleanor waited.

The carriage stopped outside the Fairchild townhouse. “I do not know,” Louisa admitted, her voice small.

Her cheeks flushed. For two years the answer had been yes, automatic, rehearsed, polished smooth by repetition. The yes had been the only fixed point in a life that shifted beneath her feet with every quarter’s rent. The yes had kept her steady when the gowns were let out and taken in and let out again, when the silver was sold, and the carriage horse went lame, when her father closed his study door and left the letters unopened on the salver.

She had built the yes into the walls of her plans, and now it was gone, and she could feel the draught where it had been.

Eleanor reached across the seat and took her hand.

“Good,” she said quietly. “That is the first honest answer you have given me in weeks.”

The coachman opened the door. Louisa stepped down into the night. She did not look back at Eleanor. She crossed the pavement, climbed the steps, and let herself into the house where the hallway clock was striking midnight and her mother’s voice was calling from the drawing room to ask how the evening had gone.

“Very well,” she called back, and closed the door behind her, and stood in the dim hallway with her shawl still clutched around her shoulders and the taste of warm lemonade still on her tongue and no idea, for the first time in two years, what she wanted.

CHAPTER 21

“You are brooding into your drink.” Sebastian leaned against the pillar beside Oliver, arms folded, as he surveyed the room with the detached interest he brought to all social gatherings, endlessly instructive and occasionally absurd. “You have been standing in this corner for forty minutes. You have spoken to no one. You have refused Mrs. Pemberton’s attempt at conversation, which is remarkable, because Mrs. Pemberton is seventy-three and wanted only to discuss her spaniel.”

Oliver scowled. “I was polite.”

“You were glacial.”

Oliver took another sip of his drink. Lady Hathaway’s musicale occupied three connected drawing rooms on the first floor of her Bruton Street house, each more suffocating than the last. A hundred and forty guests filled chairs, lined corridors, clustered near doorways, all of them pretending to listen to a tenor from Covent Garden.

Oliver watched the room. Louisa was seated near the second window beside Eleanor Whitmore, her gloved hands folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on the singer.

She wore green tonight. Pale, like the underside of a new leaf. Her hair was pinned at her nape, a few loose strands curling against her neck where the heat had undone the work of her maid. The pearl at her throat caught the candlelight each time she turned her head.

He had not spoken to her. Not tonight, not for the past six days. Six days since the visit to her drawing room where they had discussed the weather with the stilted courtesy of strangers sharing a railway carriage. Six days since he had stood by her fireplace turning his hat by the brim, unable to look at her mouth without remembering the library, the taste of her, the sound she had made when his hand found the back of her neck.

“She looks well,” Sebastian observed, following his gaze all too easily.

Oliver swallowed. “I had not noticed.”

“Naturally. The green suits her. I mention it only as an observation, not as a provocation, though I suspect you will receive it as one regardless.”

The tenor finished. Applause filled the room, enthusiastic from the front rows where Lady Hathaway’s closest allies were seated, tepid from the back where honesty held more ground than politeness. Guests rose. The interval had begun. Servants appeared with trays of wine and cordial, and the crowd shifted, rearranged, broke into the smaller conversations that were always the true purpose of a musical.

Frederick Langley materialized beside Louisa’s chair before the applause had faded. Oliver watched him lean close, offer his hand, say words Oliver could not hear from this distance. Louisa stood and smiled. The smile was precise, measured, and Oliver recognized it because he had spent weeks teaching her to deploy it, and because he could tell, even from thirty feet, that it did not reach her eyes.

“You could speak to her,” Sebastian insisted gently.

“There is nothing to say.”

“There is a great deal to say. You are simply unwilling to say any of it.” Sebastian took the claret from his hand, examined it, and set it on the nearest tray with an expression of mild offence. “I shall find you a proper drink. Try not to freeze anyone else while I am gone.”