“There is always another submission. Another committee. Another season in which I am being assessed by men who knew my father and are waiting, with varying degrees of patience, to locate the point at which I surpass him.” His jaw was tight. “There is no sufficient. There is only the next thing required, and the thing after that, and the understanding, underneath all of it, that the standard I’m working toward was set by a man who never lived up to his own impossible expectations yet did not believe I was capable of meeting them either.”
He paused. She said nothing.
“He had a word,” Anthony continued, in the flat, even tone of a man reciting a fact rather than disclosing a wound. “For what I was.Useless. He used it with some regularity.” He sighed. “I was seventeen when my brother died. He had been the heir. By every measure my father applied, he had been what I was not. When he was gone, my father made it clear enough that I was a situation he intended to outlive.”
The uniformity in his voice was the only available alternative to something he would not permit himself in a field at half past ten.
“He did not outlive it. The title came to me. And I have spent the six years since—” He stopped. Something moved in his jaw. “It does not matter.”
“It clearly does,” she said.
He looked at her then, with the sharp, brief attention of a man who had not expected to have an audience that had listened to his every word and wished for him to continue speaking. Then he looked away.
“I have not said this to anyone,” he said.
It sounded, if anything, like an accusation, directed at himself rather than at her, for the fact of having said it at all.
Caroline was quiet for a moment.
“I have heard men discuss the Wynford estate,” she said at last. “Not in drawing rooms, for they do not trouble themselves to include women in such conversations, which is their loss. At the edges of things. After dinner, in corridors, when they believe no one is attending.” She held his gaze. “I have heard Lord Hartley say your tenancy retention is the best in the county this decade. I have heard Lord Greville, who extends approval to no living person without thorough reluctance, say the Wynford drainage scheme was the most competent piece of estate management to pass the agricultural committee in recent memory.” She paused. “Thetonwhispers that you are a rake. They have done so for years, and they will continue. But my brother, who knows something about land, money, and the actual management of real things, says something rather different. And he has no reason to be generous.”
She lifted her chin.
“Your father was wrong about you, and I do not say it to be kind. The evidence is specific, and you have produced every piece of it yourself.”
Anthony held her gaze, his heart pounding hard within his ribcage, and an expression suffused his face. It lasted only a brief moment before it was gone, suppressed with the practiced efficiency of a man who had long ago decided that being seen was a liability.
Then his gaze dropped to her mouth, and the leash he kept on himself simply snapped. Just like that, the distance between them ceased to exist.
Anthony could not have said when; whether it had been the accumulated pull of weeks, or the cold, or the dark, or the simple fact that she had just looked at him with eyes that contained no calculation whatsoever.
“How do you say things aloud that others only dare whisper?” he asked, his brow furrowing.
“I have no need to hide from you,” she responded with a slight shrug.
His voice dropped low. “Why? Why are you so open with me? Why do you show me your true self when you perform for others?”
“I trust you, Anthony,” she said as she stepped closer. “Just as you have shown me trust by sharing this story about your father, I know that I can be myself with you.”
Anthony shook his head. “With you, I am… different. Unrestrained.”
She could laugh lightly. “I would hardly call your behavior unrestrained. I…”
His hand was cradling her jaw before he had fully completed the decision, and then his mouth was on hers.
This was not the choreography he had perfected over three decades of women who expected charm and left satisfied but never shaken. This moment bore no resemblance to any of that.
This was acollision, the full, bruising meeting of everything he’d spent years teaching himself to contain and the simple, devastating fact of her.
He kissed her like a manstarving.
His other hand fisted in the wool of her cloak and yanked her closer until there was no space left, until her body pressed flush against his and he could feel every tremor that ran through her. She met him with the same reckless force: her lips opening under his, tongue seeking his without hesitation. A small, desperate sound escaped her throat that went straight through him like a blade.
He angled her head, deepening the kiss until it was near obscene in its unhurried thoroughness, tasting every corner of her mouth as though he could memorize her this way. Her fingers clawed into his coat lapels, dragging him impossibly closer; her nails scraped the back of his neck, and he groaned into her mouth. The sound was low, broken, and involuntary.
The circus could have burned down around them, and he would not have noticed.
“Impeccable.” The word was breathless on his tongue as he took in her freshly kissed face, which was entirely his doing.