“She’ll choose what I choose,” Lewis said, and then, hearing himself, amended it immediately. “That is to say, I’ll present her with good options and trust her to be sensible.”
Anthony said nothing about that, either. He was becoming well-practiced at it.
“Wynford.” Gideon watched him, faintly thoughtful; Anthony knew that look, and it never preceded anything harmless. “You’ve gone quiet.”
“I am always quiet. You’re simply louder than usual,” he retorted, his tone deliberately languid.
Before the Marquess could produce a rejoinder, Anthony felt the shift.
Three women arrived at the table, their approach all too seamless. He recognized the maneuver instantly. They were well-dressed, possessed clever eyes, and seemed perfectly at home here—a combination he had once found difficult to resist.
“Your Grace.” The brunette offered Lewis a smile polished to professional warmth. Anthony knew that look. Lewis had already been ruled out. “Lord Eastbell.”
“Ladies.” Gideon immediately sat straighter with a smile spreading his lips upward, which was one of the more transparent things about him.
Lewis rose, offered a bow of impeccable correctness, said something brief and pleasant about the hour, and excused himself with the fluid efficiency of a happily married man who had no desire to be anywhere else.
Anthony watched him go without surprise. It was one of the things he genuinely respected about Lewis.
The woman who turned toward him was fair and pretty. And there it was in her eyes, that quick glint. Like a woman reopening a profitable investment.
“Your Grace,” she said. “You look well.”
“Miss Harton.”
He was entirely civil. He was still contemplating the possibility of entertaining a woman, which, if he was being completely honest, was something he had never had to think about before. It had always simply happened, as naturally and inevitably as breathing.
“As do you.” He inclined his head in greeting.
Gideon was already deep in conversation with the brunette, from which position he cast Anthony a sideways glance of absolute enjoyment.
A woman settled into Lewis’s vacated chair without invitation, which told Anthony something about her before she spoke. She was handsome in the direct, uncomplicated way of someone who had long since stopped pretending otherwise, and she looked at him with the frank appraisal of a professional.
“You’ve been away,” she said. “I was beginning to think we’d lost you to respectability.”
“Not yet.”
“I am glad to hear it.” She tilted her head, the candlelight catching the copper in her hair. “You look like a man who could use the company of the non-respectable variety.”
He looked at her, and the calculation was simple and familiar: she was willing, he was not otherwise engaged, and it was the work of a moment to say yes. He had said yes to precisely this same proposition on a dozen similar evenings without a second thought. The dozen evenings had been entirely adequate, and there had been nothing to think about afterward.
He waited for the inclination to arrive. It did not.
Instead, with the specific unhelpfulness of a mind that had apparently decided to operate entirely outside his authority, what arrived was the image of a pair of hazel eyes across a candlelit room, direct and unguarded, and a voice saying, “I only want these things first, while they are still possible.”
The inclination to accept this woman’s hand and while the night away frivolously continued to fail to appear with a thoroughness that was frankly embarrassing. He had not thought it possible to be thwarted by a woman who was not even in the room.
“Another time,” he said, and his voice came out even, which was something.
She tilted her head. “Saturday, then.”
“Equally occupied.” The smile he produced was warm and entirely final and left no room for the conversation to continue in this particular direction.
She held his gaze for a beat, her stare blatantly assessing, before she turned toward Gideon with the graceful redirection of a woman who knew when to move on and leave well enough alone.
Anthony looked down at his glass. He had a note he had sent and a meeting he had arranged for two nights from now, in his own house, which was an entirely different category of commitment and not one he intended to examine in company.
He knew when, exactly, he had stopped wanting what had previously been straightforward to want. He could name the alley. He could name the precise moment she had spun round from his grip, her hat had gone flying, her hair had come down across her shoulders, and she had looked at him with those hazel eyes, sharp and brilliant and entirely unimpressed. He had felt something shift beneath his feet like a ship taking a wave.