The question arrived in the room like a change in temperature, and she stood with it for a moment, turning it over, and found,to her irritation, that she did not have an immediate, dismissible answer.
“That,” she said, “is not a useful question.”
“Humor me.” He said it with the quiet certainty of a man who had already understood that she would humor him, in fact.
Caroline exhaled. “Chemistry,” she said. “Natural history. The specific lunacy of requiring a woman to find a husband by performing the version of herself least likely to alarm anyone.” She stopped. “Anything except what I am actually thinking at any given moment.”
He looked at her with something she could not name. His brows were drawn low and furrowed heavily, giving all his features a steady and entirely serious look.
Then he moved.
He crossed the small distance that separated them and skirted behind her. She was astonished by how close he stood, and she felt his warmth before she felt anything else. Her pulse arrived in her throat with the abruptness of something dropped.
“You are always thinking,” he said, at the edge of her ear, his voice low and velvety, “at approximately twice the speed of anyone around you. But you are very skilled at hiding your thoughts.”
She did not move. She could not, quite. “You are standing rather close, Your Grace,” she said, her voice coming out like air despite her best efforts.
“I am.” His hand found her waist, light and certain. The warmth of his palm moved through the silk of her gown, and she felt every nerve in her body realign around that single point of contact.
“The woman out there,” he continued, and his voice was still that quiet, unhurried thing that she had no adequate defense against, “the one smiling at the clock and answering questions about counties she doesn’t care to visit?—”
His thumb traced a slow arc along her waist, as though he were simply thinking aloud and his hand had decided to conduct a separate, more honest conversation.
“That’s not the woman who answered the lecturer’s question before anyone else in the room had found their footing,” he continued.
Caroline exhaled unevenly.
“That’s not the woman,” he went on, “who walked into the Black Boar in a man’s coat and tried to hold her ground against a drunk twice her size.”
“She is the same woman,” Caroline said. “She simply knows which one the room requires.”
“Yes.” His lips brushed the curve of her neck, justbarely, and she gasped, a small, involuntary thing, and hated herself for it immediately.
She felt him still behind her.
“There she is.” The words came out as pure vibrations in his throat, and Caroline barely managed to suppress a shudder.
“That’s—” She attempted a steady voice and produced only most of one. “That’s unfair.”
“Mm.”
His hand at her waist did not tighten; it simply remained, warm and real, and his mouth hovered over the exposed column of her neck once more. He spoke slowly, with exquisite patience, as though he were making a very particular point.
This time, the sound she made was not quite a gasp and certainly not something she could produce in a ballroom, not if her life had depended on it.
“You want to be free of it,” he said against her skin. “You want to stop performing and simply be who you are inside.”
“Don’t… Don’t we all?” she managed, her throat working.
“No.” He paused. “Most of us don’t know we’re performing.” His thumb moved again at her waist in a slow, soft arc. “But you… You know exactly what you are forced to do. And you hate every second of it.”
She turned her head, very slightly, but she did not look at him; she could not look at him directly at this very moment and retain any composure. Still, her movement was enough that his lips were no longer teasing at her neck, and she had room to breathe again.
“Yes,” she said, quietly, into the firelit dark of the library. “I do.”
It was the most honest thing she had said to anyone in a very long time. Even more honest than the first time she’d revealed her thoughts to him after being caught at the boxing match.
He was quiet for a moment. She could feel the warmth of him, steady and very close, and the fire burned a bit brighter.