She did not like what she saw now. Because he was too controlled, perfectlycivil. It felt like a performance, and the falseness of it made her uneasy. Because now she could not help but wonder what he was hiding, what he was so determinedly not saying.
This was not the man who had demanded she come to him. This was not the man who had looked at her across Lewis’s drawing room with barely restrained possession in his eyes. This was someone else entirely, someone careful and distant, and she did not trust this version of the Duke.
“The pheasant is excellent,” she said, trying to ease the tension that had settled over the table like fog.
“It should be,” he said. “I threatened the cook with bodily harm if it wasn’t.”
Her lips twitched. “I’m sure he found that very motivating.”
“He did seem unusually attentive.”
It was the sort of light, meaningless exchange they might have had at any ball, any dinner, or any other public occasion where performance was required. But here, in this room, with no audience but each other, it felt hollow. She heard the falseness in his voice, and it made her throat tighten.
She set down her fork with precision that communicated more than words might have.
“You’re quiet tonight,” she said, after some time.
“Am I?”
“You are.” She dabbed the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin. “You’re also being perfectly civil, which is somehow worse.”
He looked at her across the table, at the firelight catching in her hair and the particular, stubborn tilt of her chin, and she watched something shift behind his eyes.
“What would you prefer?” he asked.
“Honesty,” she said. Caroline had already spent half the meal pondering it, so it now came out without much thought on her part. The word sat in the air between them, unadorned and impossible to sidestep.
She watched him consider it, weighing what he wanted to say against what he thought heshouldsay. She knew himwell enough by now to recognize the calculation, the careful management of truth.
“Very well,” he said, finally. He reached for his glass, drank, and set it down again. “The truth is that I brought you here tonight because I wanted one more evening…one more night with you before…before this arrangement ends.”
Her fingers tightened fractionally around the stem of her glass. “The arrangement is already over. The list is complete.” She reminded him, even as panic started an insidious crawl on the insides of her chest.
“Not quite,” he said calmly.
She frowned. “The painting was the last item.”
“The painting,” he said, “was the fifth.”
She absorbed this, working through the list in her mind. Boxing match. University lecture. Gaming hell. Fortune teller. Painting.
“The kiss,” she said slowly. “But we’ve already?—”
“That,” he said, “wasnotaproperkiss.”
Her eyes widened fractionally. “It felt rather proper to me.”
“It was rushed,” he said. “It was interrupted by a drunk man at a circus. It was not—” He stopped. “I want this one to count.”
The silence that followed was thick with an emotion that pressed against the walls of the room and made the air between them feel heavier than it had any right to.
And her heart…her heart was beating too quickly; she could feel it in her throat, her wrists, and at the pulse-point at the base of her neck.
“Anthony,” she said quietly, because she needed to say something and his name was all that came to mind. His name, which had become both a question and an answer, a plea, and a challenge.
He rose from the table, and she watched him cross to the window, watched the rigid set of his shoulders, and knew he was wrestling with something he did not want to say aloud. Something that mattered more than he wanted to admit.
She stood. The rustle of silk was loud in the quiet room, and Caroline felt her pulse climb higher.