He should not have agreed to helping her go through her list. No matter how he looked at it, it was betrayal. That was plainly the truth of it.
He had agreed anyway, and now, he could not pull out.
Gideon glanced at him across the table, and his expression was fractionally more attentive than his usual amusement.
Anthony stood, made his excuses briefly and without elaboration, and walked out of the pub into the cold night air.
“What the devil am I doing?” he muttered under his breath.
He had no answer for himself, at least none that he was prepared to dissect just yet.
Chapter Five
“You’re late,” Anthony said.
“I’m on time.” Caroline stepped further into the room and pulled off her gloves, finger by finger, because it gave her hands something to do and she needed that rather badly at the moment. “You didn’t specify an exact hour.”
“After eleven.” He did not move from where he stood near the window, a glass of claret already in hand, his coat off, sleeves turned once at the wrist. “It is now past midnight.”
“Then I am after eleven,” she said. “By definition.”
He looked at her for a beat with those steady eyes, and she held his gaze with composure she was not entirely sure she actually had.
Then he gestured at the nearest chair. “Sit down, Lady Caroline. You are my guest, even though you are tardy.”
She sat, because the alternative was standing in the doorway until her pride made the decision for her. And then she looked at the room, properly, for the first time.
It was not what she had expected. She was not entirely certain what she had expected… something grander, perhaps; something more deliberately constructed for effect. The Wynford sitting room, she imagined, had been a theater piece, appointed for impression.
This was not that.
It was a room of moderate size, with bookshelves running one full wall and a fire burning with the particular settled warmth of one that had been tended for hours. Surprisingly, there was a table in the center which had been laid for two, quite simply: white cloth, two tapers, a covered dish, a bottle of claret open and breathing beside the nearest glass.
No flowers. No performance of it. Just the fire, the light, and the table.
The knot that had lived beneath her sternum for the better part of two hours loosened without her permission.
He poured her a glass without asking and set it in front of her, then lifted the cover from the dish with the matter-of-fact ease which clearly signaled that food was the business at hand. There was roasted chicken, buttered vegetables, bread still warm from the kitchen—simple, good food, that did not indicate any particular effort to impress.
She had not expected that either.
“You arranged all this,” she said, unable to remove the wonder from her tone.
“I was under the impression that was the nature of having someone to dinner.” He passed her the loaf.
She took it with a mere second’s hesitation. “I expected something more like a negotiation.”
“There will be one of those as well.” He reached for the chicken. “Eat first.”
So, she ate. She had not thought she would; her nerves had spent the carriage ride convincing her that appetite was someone else’s problem entirely, but the food was good, the claret was better, and the fire was warm.
Somewhere between the first glass and the second, she began, against her own better judgment, to relax.
He was an easy man to sit with in silence. She had not expected that at all. Frankly, she had expected the charm she had heard about in fragments over her time back in London: the polished ease, the particular, practiced warmth that reportedly made women lose all critical faculty.
Instead, this man before her ate, drank, and looked at the fire, without manufacturing conversation where there was none to be had.
Caroline found herself watching him sideways, careful not to be caught. He occupied space differently than other men she had known. Not with aggression, not with performance, but with a natural certainty that this was where he was, and it required no further justification.