His expression shifted then. It was not quite the corner-of-the-mouth movement, nor was it quite the thing she had seen in the dark outside the fortune teller’s tent, but something in the region of both.
“Would you like me to sit for the portrait?” he asked.
Caroline sucked in a calming breath and looked at the Serpentine, visible between the elms, where the morning light was arriving on the water in pale, unsteady increments.
“Is this the only reason you called me out here, Your Grace?” she retorted. Caroline recognized that they were now volleying questions back and forth without answering each other, and that irritated her immensely.
He tilted his head slightly. “Yes. Do you think it is unworthy of a clandestine meeting such as this?”
“Yes.” She answered, and the Duke’s lips twitched. That annoyed her, too. “If you are not going to let me finish the list with another, then you should have just stayed quiet and letusfinish it. There was no need for this.” She let him have the few seconds, then she said, “Good morning, Your Grace,” turned, and walked back up the path toward the gate.
She did not look back toward him. She was, however, entirely aware that he stood where she had left him until she had cleared the elm trees and did not move before that point.
She kept walking, and the morning light came through the branches in pale, unsteady pieces. Caroline reminded herself that sitting for a portrait was simply an item on a list, that the list was the point, and that everything else was peripheral, manageable, and entirely beside the matter.
She told herself this with exactly the same conviction with which she had been telling herself, for four days, that the kiss had meant nothing.
She was becoming rather less persuasive to herself than she had been before.
Chapter Twenty
PAINT A NAKED MAN
“You are going to make me regret this,” Caroline said, from the shadows of the front step, where she had been waiting for precisely four minutes longer than she had intended.
Anthony was already at the gate, in a dark coat, no hat. He looked at her with the half-lidded attention that communicated he had observed the four minutes and elected to say nothing about them, which she found, in some ways, worse than if he had spoken.
“You will not,” he said.
“You don’t know that.” She came down the steps, pulling her cloak tighter against the March chill.
The street was empty; it was past eleven, and Grayston House was quiet behind her, every lamp extinguished except the one in Lewis’s study, which she had confirmed from the garden-facingside of the house was the lamp of a man still going through correspondence and not of a man walking the corridors in any condition to look out of a window.
“I know you,” Anthony said. He offered his arm in a particular way that managed to be simultaneously a show of impeccable manners and deeply provoking, but she took it. “The carriage is two streets down.”
“You said it was not far.”
“It is not far. It is on the outskirts.”
“Those are not the same description.”
“On the outskirts of London is not far from London,” he said, with the equanimity of a man winning an argument he had decided not to acknowledge was a debate.
Caroline said nothing more. They walked without speaking past the dark row of townhouses, their steps quiet on the pavement.
She was aware, as she was always aware when she walked beside him, of the particular quality of his presence: steady and warm and rather too large for her to ignore even when she was directing her best efforts toward doing so.
The carriage was where he said it would be. There was no crest or livery. She had noted this pattern over the preceding months: the arrangements he made quietly, without the kind of evidencethat required explaining afterward. He had thought of things before she knew how to ask for them, and she had learned, gradually, to let that be what it was without turning it over in her hands until she found the thing inside it that alarmed her.
She had not always been successful.
They had sat facing each other, and she had kept her focus on the window, on the structures passing by. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
The mansion was beyond the last proper street, set back from the road behind a stand of elm trees that had not yet fully committed to their spring foliage and produced a pleasant, tentative screening. It was a handsome house with confident proportions, and every window on the ground floor was lit.
Through the carriage window, as they drew up the lane, Caroline could hear, faintly, the sound of music and laughter and something that might have been recitation, though she could not make out the words.
“Who lives here?” she asked.