It changed things.
She had watched him with cards before, had watched him with most things by now, but this was different. Without the divided attention, he was faster and more openly strategic, making plays she only understood two moves later and occasionally grinning at her reaction when she did.
“You let me win,” she said after the third hand.
“I did not.”
“You pulled that last card deliberately.”
“I played the last card to win,” he corrected, “and you intercepted it. That is not the same thing.”
“It looked deliberate.”
“Perhaps your interpretation is colored by the fact that you won.” He dealt with the easy, unconscious efficiency of long habit. “Again?”
She picked up her hand and found him looking at her sideways, over his cards.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” He returned his attention to the game. Then, after a moment added, “You were extraordinary at the first table.”
It was said without inflection, stripped of its usual layering of amusement. Caroline felt the warmth of it arrive before she could prepare for it; clean and immediate, the way warmth always arrived when it was genuine.
She looked at her cards. “I had good teachers,” she said. “Lewis once paid me a shilling to correctly calculate odds in my head. He found it amusing that I could.”
“I imagine he found the skill considerably less amusing when you then used it to relieve him of money.”
She looked at him sharply. He was watching her with an expression she had not seen before.
Fondness, she thought.The Duke is fond of playing cards or…of spending time with me?
She sent him a soft smile. “You know my brother so well,” she mused.
“I believe I have come to know you quite well, too,” he murmured.
In this place where anonymity was a necessity, perhaps even a requirement, Caroline acknowledged that she and the Duke were learning more about each other at every moment. While he watched her carefully and made quiet remarks throughout the rest of the round, she could not stop the flow of conversation between them. She wanted to glean all she could about the Duke of Wynford now because something told her that when the night was over, and they left this place, things between them would forever be altered.
The cold hit her the moment they crossed the threshold; a clean, sharp sweep of March air that moved through the garnet silk without ceremony and arrived at her skin with the particularity of something honest.
After the close warmth of the gaming hell, the chill was not a hardship. It was a relief. She stood on the step and breathed it in, the smell of cold stone and night and the distant suggestion of the river.
The Duke was beside her; his coat buttoned against the cold she was now beginning to feel with rather more sincerity. He said nothing, and she was grateful for it.
The carriage was waiting at the far end of the short street. He fell into step beside her, unhurried, and for a few moments they walked in silence that felt not like an absence of conversation but like a different quality of one.
“Thank you,” she said at last.
She did not mean it in the cursory way one thanked a man for handing one into a carriage. She meant it in the way she had meant the thank you when she had taken the purse, with the accumulated weight of everything the evening had been and all the things she could not say about why it mattered.
He glanced at her. “You are thanking me for watching you win money.”
“I am thanking you for this.” She gestured, briefly, at the street, the night, and in the direction from which they had come. “For all of it.” She paused. “You do not know what it is to be endlessly managed. My uncle, when I was young, managed everything through fear. My aunt managed with affection, but managed, nonetheless. And now Lewis, who…” She stopped, taking a breath. “He loves me. I know he loves me. But love, in my experience, has always arrived with a set of instructions.”
She felt the words as she spoke them, finding the shape of what she had not quite named before.
“I have never wanted to be a burden to him,” she confessed. “I have tried never to be one, and still…” She shook her head. “He arranged suitors before I had drawn breath this Season.”
The street was very quiet. Their footsteps were the only sound, even against the stone.