He guided her toward the quieter edge of the room and stopped, his gaze moving over the space as he read the room: the exits, the concentrations of people, the tables that would tell him something she could not yet interpret but was eager to learn.
She watched him do it, the methodical, unshowy competence of it, and thought that he was entirely different from every man she had been presented with across this Season. Not better in any category she could name in polite company. Simply different in a way that resisted the accounting.
He turned to her.
“These are the rules you must follow while you are here,” he said, and the ambient noise of the room granted them privacy that no ballroom corner had ever managed. “You will not exceed what I give you. If you wish to leave any table, say so. If you wish to leave entirely, say so immediately.” His eyes held hers through the candlelight and the mask. “And you will tell me if anything makes you uncomfortable.”
“You have given me more rules than anyone else currently operating in this room,” she observed.
“Yes.” He produced a small purse from his coat and held it out. “This is not a loan. It is yours entirely. I will not ask for an accounting of it, and I will not mention it to your brother.”
She looked at the purse and did not take it immediately.
Your brother.
The words arrived without drama and settled beside everything else she had been trying not to think about since morning.
This money just reminded her of the fact that she would never make her own money…and she did not know if she should take it now, because it was not her money.
But she could not resist; she took the purse. It was lighter than she expected. It was also entirely hers, which was not a category she had much practice in, and the feeling of it in her palm stirred the excitement in her blood.
Because even though this was not her money, the fact that he was giving it to her could only mean that he trusted her with it, did it not?
That was more than even Lewis had ever given her, really.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it with considerably more weight than two words could gracefully carry.
Again, his expression shifted, but the emotion was brief, and she could not ascertain what it was before it was gone.
Then, he nodded once. “Shall we?”
She looked out at the room: the masked faces bent over their cards, the candlelight turning everything amber and unreal, the particular quality of freedom that accumulated in a space where no one knew your name and no one had decided, in advance, what you were permitted to want.
She was not a lady here. She was not her brother’s obligation or her aunt’s project or the woman who had sat through suitor calls and smiled at the clock and answered questions about Shropshire with the cultivated vacancy of someone enduring a very long sentence. She was not the woman whose future was being arranged by men who loved her and could not quite distinguish that love from authority.
She was just another player.
The warmth of it moved through her chest with a speed that surprised her; not the warmth of the room, though the room was warm, but something that arrived the way her best answers always arrived, before she had time to reason herself out of it.
She looked at the Duke. He was watching her with those steady green eyes, and in the candlelight and the shadow of the mask, his expression was not impatient…
No, he waswaiting. He was watching and waiting for her to move in that way, which was entirely, specifically his own.
“Did you think I was going to cower? You ought to know me better by now.”
She raised her chin, tightened her grip on the purse, and stepped forward into the room.
Chapter Thirteen
The table the Duke chose was neither the most crowded nor the most isolated.
Five other players had arranged themselves around the green baize when they settled: a barrel-chested merchant type who held his cards with the grip of a man strangling an invoice, two young bucks who’d clearly come in a pair and would clearly leave in a worse mood than they’d arrived, a woman of middle years whose expression communicated absolute indifference to every person at the table, and a lean, still figure in a plain black mask who had not moved perceptibly in several minutes and whom Caroline identified, on instinct, as the most dangerous player present.
She took the chair her companion indicated, arranged the purse in her lap, and picked up the cards which were dealt. Recognition flashed immediately.
It was loo. Sheknewloo.
“You have played before,” the Duke said quietly beside her.