“He was insufferable.” Caroline turned away from the window. “He lectured me about the neighborhood, called it a matter of personal safety rather than personal interest, you know, all the usual,” she said, shaking her head, pressing her back into the seat. “But… he won’t say anything to my brother. I’m fairly certain.”
“Fairly certain.” Laura’s voice shook. “You arefairly certain.”
“He seemed more concerned with the principle of the thing than with any genuine intention to report us. If he wanted my brother to know, he would have said so plainly.” She paused. “I imagine the Duke of Wynford knows a thing or two about helping young ladies make hasty departures. And, just as he would not want others to gossip about his clandestine meetings, I am sure he will keep our secret.”
Laura gave this the consideration it perhaps didn’t entirely deserve. “He’s terribly attractive,” she said finally, in a tone that suggested this was a reluctant admission.
“He is the most infuriating man I’ve met,” Caroline said.
And she meant it. She was quite sure she meant it.
And yet as the carriage rolled east through the dark and the lamplight tracked in slow repetition across the ceiling, she found herself replaying the exact distance at which he had been standing, the steady, unhurried green of his gaze…
She could not, no matter how firmly she directed her attention elsewhere, make herself stop.
She pressed her knuckle against her lips and looked out at the dark street beyond the window.
Infuriating, she told herself, as the carriage carried them home.
Chapter Three
“You look dreadful,” Lewis said cheerfully, by way of greeting. “Come in and have coffee.”
“Your hospitality is unsurpassed,” Anthony replied in a deadpan voice.
It seemed his friend was in a rather good mood, because he did not comment on the lack of enthusiasm in his voice at all.
Instead, Lewis simply said, “It really is. This way.”
Anthony had not intended to call on Lewis. That was the precise, unvarnished truth of it, and he had been a man long enough to know when his own reasoning was performing acrobatics on his behalf.
He had ridden past Grayston House twice that morning, telling himself the first time that he was simply taking the longer route back from his solicitor’s. As for the second time, he’d toldhimself that he’d simply forgotten to turn, and on the third pass, he had dismounted with a rigidness that the groom had the good sense not to remark upon.
He had two reasons to be here. He had manufactured one on the ride over: Lewis’s opinion on a matter of upcoming parliamentary business, which was conveniently true. As for the second, a more frivolous one, he would not examine that notion. It’d be best if he stuck to the practical reason for now.
He followed his friend through the corridor toward the morning room, taking in the house with the practiced, peripheral attention of a man accustomed to reading rooms rather than admiring them. Well-ordered, quietly comfortable, with his Lewis’ wife’s evident sense of arrangement softening the older, more austere lines of the house.
Then Anthony heard a step on the staircase. He turned.
She was halfway down, one hand trailing the banister, and the moment she saw him, she stopped. Not a gradual slowing; a complete, sudden arrest of motion, as though she had walked directly into a wall that had materialized without warning.
For the space of roughly two seconds, Lady Caroline Marfront stood perfectly still, and Anthony saw her school her expression into composure in real time.
She managed it quickly, and with more composure than most people twice her age could have summoned under equivalent circumstances. By the time she had descended the remainingsteps and reached the landing, she was tranquil, and she met his gaze with hazel eyes that gave away nothing at all.
He looked at her, and then, rather against his own better judgment, he kept looking.
He had seen her before. Several times, across the last few years, in this very house and elsewhere, but those occasions had been brief, and he had, if he was candid, paid them very little attention. She had only been Lewis’s younger sister, a category of person to whom he had always made a firm point of not attending.
Today, Caroline was wearing a pale morning gown, simply cut, with her light brown hair dressed and her face clear of ornament. There was nothing about it that should have been remarkable. She looked much like every other young lady in London. But Anthony could not shake the vision of her that lurked in his brain. She had not been unremarkable in a man’s coat and a battered hat in a dark alley two nights ago. She had been…something else entirely. That was the problem.
He noticed the straight-spined bearing of a woman who had been trained to perfection and had chosen to wear that training like armor rather than an accessory. Yet he also noticed underneath it something loose, alive, and thoroughly uninterested in compliance. He noticed the line of her jaw and the color in her cheeks and?—
Stop this right now, he chastised himself.
She was Lewis’s sister.
She was also currently looking at him the way one looked at an unexploded mortar that had materialized in their front hallway.