She had known men who wore that quality as a costume. On the Duke, it was simply… him.
“Tell me about the list.” He breached the silence suddenly, and Caroline did not like the way his voice made her pulse spike.
She set her glass down and cleared her throat once. “I’ve told you about the list.”
“You told me what’s on it.” His eyes moved from the fire to her face. “I’m asking why.”
“I believe I already explained?—”
“You explained the mechanics,” he clarified. “You told me what you wanted. I’m asking how it started. Why these things specifically? Why now?”
The fire settled. Outside, somewhere distant, a horse’s hooves rang against cobblestone and faded.
Caroline looked at her glass and thought about the sporting pamphlet she had found at sixteen, in the back of her uncle’s library, the room from which she had been explicitly barred. The cramped, vivid print of it.
“It wasn’t all at once,” she finally said, her tone quiet. “It was accumulated. Years of it.” She turned the stem of her glass slowly. “Lady Hayward was very thorough. Three years of very thorough. And before that, there was Uncle Timothy, who was thorough in a different way.”
She looked up. He was watching her with that steady, quiet attention, and she thought, not for the first time, that it was an unnerving quality in a man who was supposed to be interested only in surfaces.
“When Laura and I made that list, it was not about any single item. It was about writing down the shape of a life I won’t have.” She stopped. “That sounds?—”
“Accurate,” he said.
She looked at him.
“You said you know you will marry,” he said. “You said it as though you’d accepted it completely.”
“Ihaveaccepted it.”
“And yet here you are.” He tilted his head fractionally; that small, particular gesture she was beginning to recognize as his version of pressing a point. “After midnight, at my house… in secret.”
“Here I am,” she agreed.
“You want these things before you wed,” he said. “Not after.”
“After will be too late.” She said it plainly. “After, I will have a husband, a household, and children, most likely. Before, I still had a self that is entirely my own.”
He was quiet for a moment. The firelight moved across the planes of his face.
He’s a very striking man when he’s being serious.
She moved on from that thought with as much efficiency as she could manage.
“Then I will help you through it,” he said. “Every item.”
She knew, to the letter, what every item included. She bit the inside of her lip. “The last one?—”
“Everyitem,” he said again, steady as before. “Unless you find that you don’t want my assistance on that particular notation.”
The fire was considerably warmer than it had been a moment ago.
Caroline gulped. “I want to finish my list,” she said, at what she was satisfied was a perfectly even pitch. She smoothed her fingers across the tablecloth. “It seems to me that the last item, in particular, would benefit from—from experience. On the part of the other participant.”
Something shifted behind his eyes; brief and carefully managed.
“Is that so?” he said, and his voice had dropped half a register, which she thought was entirely unfair and unbelievably alluring.
“It seems practical,” she said.