She pursed her lips. “We are not off to a promising start.” She tilted her head slightly. “I would like to tell you something, if I may.”
He nodded, and then she moved to the window, not quite looking at him, and said, “I have a list.”
“A list?”
“Yes. My friend Laura and I made it together. Six things.” She folded her hands against her skirt; a gesture so studied in its composure that it told him more than he’d need. “Things we’ve read about. Things that are ordinary if you happen to be a man, and unthinkable if you are not.” A brief pause. “The boxing match was the first item on the list we wished to see in person.”
“And the others?”
She turned from the window then and met his gaze decidedly. “Attend a university lecture. Gamble at a gaming hell. Visit a fortune teller.” She counted out confidently, but then hesitated. “Paint a… nude figure.”
Anthony said nothing. He kept his expression entirely neutral, which required a degree of effort he chose not to examine.
“And the last,” she said, “is to have a proper, passionate first kiss.”
The room held the silence for a moment. He regarded her, and she regarded him, and neither of them looked away.
“My brother has been arranging suitors,” she continued, her voice even now, stripped of any appeal to sympathy. “These suitors are men who have done nothing but shut my opinions down, to tell me to smile, for I am most pleasant when I’msmiling, to tell me what I’m supposed to offer to them as wife, but have offered nothing of substance in return.”
She stopped and let out a quiet breath as she looked away. Anthony knew that pause, the one people made when they stopped themselves because they didn’t want to seem as vulnerable as they were.
He felt a sharp pang in his chest. Not pity, no. Pity was condescending. He didn’t pity Lady Caroline, yet he didn’t want to examine exactly what kind of feeling it was.
Mercifully, she continued, distracting him from the sensation. “I know that I will marry. I know what my life will become. I only want these things first. While they are still possible.”
The room was very quiet again.
Anthony recalled Lewis saying she’d been restless.Restless. He thought about the word, and all the things it covered and all the things it could not quite reach. About what it costs a person to build a cage of their own requirements and then climb into it gracefully.
He knew something about that.
She was watching him with those direct, vivacious eyes, and he recognized the honesty in them. Lady Caroline had spoken honestly, and she was not going to take her words back.
Now, she was simply waiting to see what the world did with her wishes.
Still, she was too reckless to be left alone. That was the plain fact of it. She would go with or without him, and without him was a considerably more dangerous proposition. By Jove, he was standing in a morning room in Grayston House applying logic to a problem that didn’t require logic to reach its inevitable conclusion. He was aware of this, yet it did not change the conclusion.
He leaned in, aware of the tightness in his jaw. He had changed his position, but that didn’t mean he liked it.
“All right,” he said at last.
Caroline blinked once, surprise blatant in her stare. “All right?”
“All right.” He straightened, then nodded. “I’ll help you through your list.”
Her lips parted, and Anthony decided that he did not notice that. He could not.
“If you insist on chasing scandal, sweetheart… then you will do it under my watch,” he continued.
Caroline bit her lip just then. Another thing which he pretended not to notice.
Instead, he held her eyes, smoothing every reaction from his features. “You will do exactly as I say, when I say it. You will not deviate, you will not negotiate, and you will not run off into dark alleys without me. Agreed?”
Something lit in her face, fast and warm, like a struck match. She pressed her lips together, clearly making an effort to contain her excitement.
“Agreed,” she said.
He held her gaze a beat longer than was strictly necessary, and a part of him wondered just what she’d look like free of this composure. How she’d look if she were completely and utterly free.