“Mm.” He did not quite smile, but the line of his mouth altered in a way that was impossible to respond to without making things considerably worse. “Practical.”
She raised her chin. “I have no complaints about the logic.”
“Nor do I.” He lifted his glass with perfect composure and drank. Then, in the tone of a man returning to business, he said, “Now… Rules.”
“I assumed there would be.” She folded her hands in her lap and waited.
“When we are out, you will do as I say.” He was unhurried about it, precise rather than imperious. “Not because I have any interest in managing you, but because the speed of a decision is the difference between safety and danger, in certain situations. If I say we leave, we leave immediately. If I say stay close, you stay close.” His eyes held hers. “And if at any point you wish to stop… any point, any item, any reason—or no reason at all—you will tell me, and I will stop. At once.” He paused. “Is that understood?”
She studied him. The gravity with which he said the final rule about stopping sat somewhere unexpectedly in her chest. There was nothing performative in it; he meant it entirely, and the knowledge opened something quiet in her that she was not prepared to examine.
“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”
“Good. Very good,” he said, his voice dropping low, making her skin tingle.
He leaned back, unhurried, and it made her spine taut, and a sharp, electric, warning shot through her in a way she couldn’t name.
The Duke stood, moved around the table, and stopped beside her chair. He reached past her and picked up the small dish that had been set near the end of the table: a syllabub, pale and trembling slightly in its glass. He dipped the spoon and looked at her in his maddening, composed way.
She knew what he was doing. She also understood that she was not going to say so.
She held his gaze and parted her lips as he fed her the dessert.
The syllabub, a frothy cloud of sweetened cream and lemon zest, was cold and sweet, and he did not move immediately after the spoon withdrew. He was bent slightly over her chair, close enough that she could see the fine weave of his linen and inhale his clean, faintly woody scent. This wasn’t helpingat all.
As he pulled the spoon away from her mouth, his gaze dropped to her mouth. When she licked her lips, his pupils dilated, turning the green irises into a deep pine forest, a place of mystery and intensity, which a part of her yearned to explore.
And the spoon was still in his hand.
Her pulse was suddenly there, heavy, and unmistakable in her throat.
The silence had changed. It moved differently now, like a window cracked open, the air thinner, charged. Nothing visible, and yet everything displaced.
“Your Grace,” she said, and it came out much quieter than she intended.
He went very still, for a brief moment, before he straightened up. The spoon went back into the dish with a small, definite sound.He took one step back and exhaled slowly through his nose. For a second, he looked at the fire as if it were safer to argue with the flames than with himself.
“It’s late,” he said.
“It is,” she agreed.
Neither of them moved. The candles on the table had burned down a full inch during the course of the evening. The fire burned on, indifferent and warm.
Outside, the city was quiet with the particular exhaustion of the very small hours, and inside this room, in the light of two guttering candles and a well-tended fire, something had been set in motion.
Something that Caroline wasn’t going to acknowledge aloud. Not tonight.
“I’ll have the carriage brought round,” he said, and his voice was back in its usual register, settled and even. “Three days from now, I will call on you again. Be ready by ten o’clock.”
She rose, slowly, and found her footing steadier than she’d expected. “What are we doing?”
He crossed to the side table, picked up her gloves, and held them out toward her. The deliberateness of the small gesture was notaccidental. The way he held her gaze when she took them from him was not accidental either.
Nothing about him, she was beginning to understand, was accidental.
“You’ll find out,” he said, “when we get there.”
Chapter Six