When the room finally stood, she rose too, and she kept her chin level all the way out.
The carriage ride back was quieter than the ride out had been.
She had changed in the dark, and by the time the Duke climbed back in, she was herself again, in her own clothes, her hair re-pinned with varying success. The men’s clothes had been folded in the bag with considerably less precision than he had managed.
The city passed the window in its familiar, indifferent progression.
When the carriage drew to its stop two streets from Grayston House, he stepped down first and held out a hand for hers. Shetook it without thinking, and the warmth of it moved through her glove in a way she had not expected. She released it the moment her shoes were on the pavement.
He turned to her, and his expression in the thin light of the streetlamp was not his usual composed mask. It was something slightly different. Opened, just fractionally, like a window in a previously sealed room.
“You blurted it,” he said. “You were right,” he said.
There was something in the three words… in the unhurried, entirely unguarded way he said them, that sat somewhere in her chest and did not shift.
He stepped back. The composed distance returned to his bearing, the practiced quality of a man resuming his usual arrangements.
“Goodnight, Lady Caroline.” His voice was even.
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
The evening was over.
She turned and walked the two streets in the cold dark, and did not look back, slipped inside, and climbed the stairs in the familiar silence of the sleeping house.
She closed her bedroom door and stood in the dark and felt the night settle around her; the wonder she had experienced in the amphitheater, the confusion, and the warmth of a man’s voice saying ‘you were right’ in the tone of someone who had meant more than those three words alone.
She pressed her hand to her sternum.
Heavens, what had she gotten herself into?
Chapter Nine
“Iam told,” the Viscount said, “that you spent some time in Florence. I myself visited once. Extraordinary city. Though I found the heat rather excessive.”
“The heat,” Caroline agreed, “is rather part of the point.”
She smiled. She had been smiling for twenty-two minutes according to the clock above the mantelpiece, with the particular, trained quality of a smile that neither invited nor discouraged. Her aunt had spent three years ensuring she could produce it under any provocation whatsoever.
Across the room, she was aware of Lady Hayward stationed near the east window. She looked like a general surveying terrain, her sharp gaze conducting its periodic, discreet inventory of every person within a twenty-foot radius.
Beside her, Esther stood talking with two ladies Caroline did not immediately recognize; she was composed, as always, withthat particular warmth that made rooms easier simply by virtue of her being in them. Lewis was somewhere behind Caroline’s left shoulder—she could feel the weight of his attention without needing to verify it—almost certainly watching Lord Aldbury’s effect upon her. He looked like a man who had identified a promising prospect and was monitoring his investment. It bothered Caroline that she and her brother had not spoken in days, but Lewis seemed unaffected.
It was, in short, a very thoroughlysupervisedevening.
The Viscount Aldbury stood beside her; for that was who Lewis had deposited her with at the earliest opportunity. His hand had briefly lingered at her elbow, and his expression was one of such pointed approval that she had nearly said something she would have regretted.
Aldbury was not an unkind man. She had gathered as much from the fragment of conversation she had overheard in the drawing room a week prior, when Lewis had spoken the name Aldbury and the Shropshire property with the tone of a man quietly congratulating himself.
He was perhaps thirty, fair-featured, possessed of a pleasant enough manner, and an obvious effort to be agreeable. He had spoken of Florence for four minutes, of the current Season for three, and of his hunting property in Derbyshire for considerably longer.
Throughout all of it, Caroline had smiled, nodded, and offered the correct small questions at the appropriate intervals. Yet she felt not the faintest tremor of anything resembling interest.
The Viscount said something further about Derbyshire, but she did not hear it.
She had seen the Duke of Wynford the moment she entered the ballroom.
It was not a matter of looking for him. She had not been looking; she had been perfectly occupied with her gloves and with her aunt’s murmured critique of the floral arrangement near the entrance. Apparently, it was a personal affront to the art of floristry, and the hostess would do well to sack whoever was responsible.