Powell looked slightly surprised but recovered easily. “Very pleasant. Fine company, as usual.”
“Lord Whitmore is a generous host,” Anthony agreed. He paused, fractionally. “I believe he keeps excellent records of his ledgers, too. He is an extraordinarily careful man with his accounts.”
Powell’s pleasantness did not shift at all. “Indeed,” he said, with a comfortable nod.
Anthony looked at him for one second longer than was natural. Then he turned to Lewis. “You are a fool,” he said, and his voice had the flatness of a statement of fact, stripped of irony, stripped of the usual tone he used to make difficult things palatable. “An utter fool.”
The silence was the kind that had a shape.
Lewis’s expression moved through surprise and then something closer to the edge of offense. “I beg your pardon?”
Anthony held his gaze for a moment. Then he inclined his head, turned without ceremony, and walked away along the path. Lord Eastbell, after a beat, made a brief, apologetic gesture in their general direction and followed.
Lord Powell said, pleasantly, “I believe the cold affects some constitutions more than others,” and gave a small, charitable laugh.
Lewis did not laugh. He was looking in the direction Anthony had gone with the expression of a man who was trying to determine whether he had been insulted or warned and could not quite arrive at a conclusion because both options required him to revise something he had considered settled.
She had never, in all the years she had glimpsed them together, heard Anthony speak to Lewis in that tone. This was different…stripped down. There had been no wit or jesting at all.
She watched Lewis blink and compose himself by degrees, and she knew her brother well enough to recognize when he was shelving something rather than dismissing it.
Lord Powell said something else. Lewis answered him. The promenade resumed.
“If you would please excuse me, I need to use the powder room,” she said, and she did not wait for leave before turning on her heel.
Caroline kept walking. She kept her face forward, her chin level, and her hands still. She did not look back.
But the dark look on Anthony’s face, the controlled,barely containedcertainty of it, sat in the center of her chest for the rest of the morning andrefusedto move. He had not even glanced at her once.
She found herself thinking about his hands on her face in the candlelight…and about the painting she would never get back.
And how much she ached for him to touch her again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The gymnasium smelled of sawdust, blood, and men who had stopped caring about the difference.
Anthony rolled his shoulder and let Brennan hit him again. The blow caught him at the jaw—same location as the previous one—and rang through his skull with the clarifying quality of a bell struck at close range. He took a step back. He did not go down.
Brennan lowered his fists with the expression of a man uncertain whether earning his wage had constituted an offense. “Your Grace?—”
“Again.”
“You’re not fighting back.”
“One more.”
The man obliged. The blow landed against Anthony’s ribs, and he exhaled and pressed his forearm to the support post. He stood there while the gymnasium continued its noise around him: leather cracking, men working, and waited for the thing he had come here for, which was a head quiet enough to think in. It did not arrive. It never did, entirely…but the gymnasium was honest in a way that the rest of his life currently was not, and that was something.
He had come here because the alternative was his study, where he had spent two evenings since walking through the park. He sat there very precisely, not thinking about Caroline beside Powell on the south gravel path, her chin level, her expression pleasant, and her eyes doing the thing they did when she was somewhere she had not decided to be.
Lord Powell.
A man touted as steady and respectable. A man with a supposedly good family and a sound estate. A man who found Latin industrious and looked at a woman who read it with the mild diplomatic smile of someone deciding whether to be politely appreciative of embroidery or watercolor.
Anthony unwrapped his hands and told himself, for the third time in as many days, that tomorrow he would be rational about it.
He had told himself this before.