Outside, the orchestra made its measured, sociable turns, and the whole world conducted itself in its usual indifferent and continuous manner.
“Good,” he said, and then he stepped back.
Caroline felt a sudden coldness after his hand left her body, and she found this a remarkably disproportionate sensation for something so small. She was entirely disoriented.
She turned. He was already at a proper distance, looking at her with his expression composed and his eyes very green in the low light. There was something in them she did not entirely have a name for, something that indicated he had just given the performance of a rake, yet she could not be certain all he had said and done was so very calculating.
“Go back,” he said.
She blinked. “What?”
“To the ballroom.” He held her gaze steadily. “Go back, smile at Lord Aldbury, let him tell you about Derbyshire again. Dance with whomever your brother has lined up for you.” His voice was even, quiet, and implacable. “Go back and do all of it. The whole performance.”
She stared at him. “That is?—”
“But know,” he said, now lower than before, “that I see you, Lady Caroline. I know that you are a mere actor, playing a part. The others…they cannot understand you the way I do.” His green eyes glittered mischievously. “Those gentlemen out there might coax conversation out of you, but I am the only one who can make your heart race.”
The fire snapped in the same instant she sucked in a sharp breath.
The orchestra turned into its next phrase, bright and carrying.
Caroline looked at him for a long, still moment, the fire burning in her belly.
Then she smoothed her gloves, lifted her chin, and walked to the door.
She did not look back.
She stepped into the corridor and made her way toward the ballroom’s warmth and noise, and when she reached the doorway, the light and music washed over her, and she let the smile arrange itself across her face as naturally as breathing.
Lord Aldbury appeared within moments, a fresh glass of champagne offered with the careful eagerness of a man who had noted her absence and wished to distinguish himself on her return.
“Lady Caroline,” he said pleasantly. “I was beginning to wonder if we had lost you.”
“Not at all,” she said, and the smile held. Just as the Duke instructed, the performance resumed its shape around her as seamlessly as a garment put on with grace.
And beneath it, entirely her own, entirely invisible, entirely unlike anything she had felt in twenty-two minutes of conversation about Derbyshire, was something warm and private and a little reckless.
Something that had no business being here in a ballroom, in a Season, or at the edge of a perfectly arranged future.
She held it there like a coin in a closed fist and smiled at the Viscount and could not, no matter how sensibly she tried, bring herself to let it go.
Chapter Ten
“You are walking,” Lady Hayward said without breaking stride, “as though the pavement has done you a personal injury.”
“I am walking perfectly well, Aunt Judith,” Caroline said.
“You are walking like a woman who intends to arrive somewhere other than where she is going.” Her aunt’s cane struck the flagstones at a measured pace; each tap was an editorial comment. “Chin level. You are not inspecting the ground for buried treasure.”
Caroline lifted her chin. Beside her, Esther pressed her lips together in the way that meant she had registered something and had elected, for the time being, to say nothing about it.
It was a fine Tuesday morning in Bond Street, which was busy with the energetic traffic of women who had nowhere urgent to be and were pursuing that idleness with considerable purpose.The milliner’s, their intended destination, was three shopfronts ahead: a bow-windowed establishment with a discreet brass plate and an arrangement of trimmed bonnets in the window that Lady Hayward had described, upon passing it last Thursday, as almost acceptable.
Almost acceptable, from Lady Hayward, was approximately equivalent to genuine rapture from anyone else.
“The jonquil,” Lady Hayward pronounced, as they reached the window and she applied her lorgnette to the display with the focused attention of a naturalist identifying a specimen. “No. The trimming is entirely wrong. The ribbon is at least six months behind.”
“I thought it rather pretty,” Esther ventured.