She lifted her chin. “That is not your concern if the arrangement is ended.”
“It is absolutely my concern.”
“Why?” She kept her voice level with the effort of someone pressing a hand flat against something that very much wanted to move. “If you have decided we should conclude?—”
“I did not say I had decided.” His voice had dropped in the quiet, rough-edged way she had last heard in the dark outside a circus tent, and it landed with the same effect it had produced then. His tone sent warmth pooling through her core. “I said it was worth raising.”
“You were suggesting we end it.”
“I was asking what you wanted.” He was looking at her now with the full, direct attention he had been withholding since he arrived, and she found that it was considerably harder to manage than the sideways version. “Which is not the same thing.”
She said nothing for a moment.
The gardener had moved to the far end of the path and was now attending to something at a distance that made him irrelevant. The park was still largely empty. Somewhere beyond the tree line, a carriage passed on the road outside the gate, its wheels producing a brief clatter and then retreating into silence.
“You said Lewis is moving forward with Ashby,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And your concern is that the timing?—”
“My concern,” Anthony said, and stopped.
He looked at the path again, briefly, and she watched him arrive at something and decide to say it regardless of what it cost him.
“My concern is that you will agree to something before you have finished. Before you have had what you set out to experience this season.”
His voice was even, but underneath the evenness there was a quality she had been learning, over weeks of proximity, to read as the thing beneath the thing: the sentence beneath the sentence.
“You made that list because you wanted the experience of your own life before someone else arranged it around you. I’m not going to let you hand the last item to some other man simply because your brother has found a respectable option, and I’m presenting you with an exit from our arrangement before you are ready to take it.”
The silence that followed was long enough to have a shape to it.
“You are not letting me,” she said at last.
“No.” He said it without apology.
She looked at him with steady, assessing attention.
Does he think he has a say about what I do with my list and with myself now because we shared that kiss? A kiss he had apologized for sharing with me?
Now, he was standing here, offering her an exit, and then, when she declined it, he was refusing to be the one to withdraw.
How dare…?
“The item requires a subject,” she said, after a moment. “A willing one, presumably.”
He held her gaze without blinking. “Presumably.”
“And you are volunteering?”
“I am stating,” he said, “that I have no intention of allowing you to ask someone else.”
She considered this for a long moment, with the deliberate composure of a woman who was not, underneath that veneer, self-possessed at all. “That is a remarkably high-handed position.”
“Yes.”
Caroline could not resist scoffing. “You could simply say you are willing to sit for it.”