Page 84 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“Do I not? Oh, he will most probably not abuse her, you can rest assured. But will he ever allow her to be more than a pretty face?”

Sebastian closed his eyes. “That… He will. He must. She has a fierce will and…”

“And he will kill that will. We both know men like him. That is what you are delivering her to,” Sebastian said. “Not cruelty. Not violence. Erasure. The slow, polite, well-intentioned erasure of everything she is. And you are standing here telling yourself it is the honorable choice because he will never raise a hand to her.”

“It is her choice.”

“It was her choice in the absence of another option. You made certain of that.”

The clock on the mantel chimed ten. Oliver counted the strokes. Somewhere beyond the club’s paneled walls, a carriage clattered past on St James’s Street, wheels striking the cobbles in a quick, reckless rhythm.

“What would you have me do?” he asked finally.

Sebastian picked up his brandy and drank. He set it down and looked at Oliver directly, all the usual amusement burned away.

“I would have you stop pretending that standing aside is the same as letting her be happy. Because I watched her tonight, Oliver. I watched her stand beside a man who adores the idea of her and has never once troubled himself to learn the reality. And I watched her smile, and smile, and smile.” He rose from the chair and straightened his coat. “And it was the saddest thing I have ever seen in a ballroom.”

He left Oliver alone beside the dying fire.

Oliver stood there for a long time. He turned his hand over and looked at his knuckles, healed now, the skin smooth where it had split. He thought of Louisa’s face the last time he had seen her, pale and furious and searching his expression for an answer he had refused to give. He thought of her reading alone in a library, tucking a book beneath a cushion before Frederick could see it, hiding the best parts of herself because the man she had chosen did not care to look.

He thought of his mother. Lifting her chin. Arranging her mouth into the shape of composure. Agreeing, because agreeing was the fastest route to the end of it.

The comparison arrived before he could stop it, and it was not the one he had feared. Not his father’s temper, reflected back. His mother’s silence, repeated in another woman’s smile.

CHAPTER 26

“We are going to the opera. I managed to secure a box through Lord Ashton. It is an excellent position on the second tier, overlooking the stage.”

Frederick did not give Louisa much time to respond. Instead, he had given her time to ready herself before picking her up. As they sat in the carriage, his excitement was meant to be contagious and yet… it left her empty. “It is simply delightful. Seats of velvet… I made sure to tell Lord Ashton how lovely it was. We shall ask him to use it again after we are married.”

Louisa sat beside him and watched the streetlamps slide past the window, each one flaring gold against the glass and dying as the carriage moved on.

“You are quiet this evening,” he said at last.

She attempted a smile. “I am listening.”

“I do appreciate that about you. Most women feel compelled to fill every silence. You understand the value of letting a man speak.” He adjusted his gloves, tugging the leather smooth across each finger as though the fit required his constant supervision. He did not seem to hear himself. He did not seem to notice that he had just praised her for doing nothing, as though her finest quality were the absence of inconvenience.

She turned from the window. “Is that a compliment?”

“Of course it is.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “I have always admired your temperament, Louisa. You are restful.”

Louisa resisted the urge to scoff. Restful. Frederick meant it kindly. She believed that. He admired her the way he admired a well-appointed morning room: pleasant, requiring no alteration, unlikely to cause a draught.

Oliver had called her clever. He had called her funny. He looked at her and saw who she was, and who she wanted to be.

Frederick had called her restful.

The word gnawed at her even as they walked into the theatre.

The opera was Mozart. Die Entführung. The soprano’s voice climbed through the darkened theatre and filled the gilt ceiling. Louisa stared out in front of her silently.

The second act opened into a duet between two lovers separated by forces neither could control, and the soprano held a phrase so long and so precisely that the sound seemed to exist outside of time, hovering in the silence after it ended, still ringing in the space where it had been.

Louisa turned to Frederick.

He was reading the program. His head was bowed, tilted toward the lamplight spilling from the sconce beside the box. His finger traced a line of text. He had not heard the duet. He had been sitting beside her for the most extraordinary passage of music she had ever encountered, and he had missed it entirely, because it had not occurred to him that the performance might matter more than the program notes describing it.