She did not step closer. She stayed where she was, her hands resting on the balustrade, and when she spoke, her voice carried the measured calm of a woman choosing her words with care.
“Then what do you want, Lucien?”
He turned to face her fully. “I want you to walk through the ton without flinching. I do not want you to endure another ballroom where someone makes you feel small, and I am not there to put myself between you and it.”
“That is not your responsibility.”
“It does not feel like a responsibility.” His voice roughened. “It does not feel like duty, or obligation, or any of what is supposed to govern an arrangement like ours. It feels like somethingI want to do. Because I want to. Because watching anyone diminish you makes me want to burn the room down.”
Elinor stared at him. The candlelight from the ballroom caught her spectacles and turned them gold. He could see her pulse in the hollow of her throat, quick and visible, and he wanted to press his mouth to it and feel it against his lips.
The space between them narrowed. He did not remember moving, but he was closer now, close enough to see the flecks of darker blue in her eyes, close enough that if he lowered his head their mouths would meet.
Her breath shortened. Her chin lifted. For one suspended moment, the terrace, the ballroom, the ton, and the ruse all fell away, and there was nothing but the distance between his mouth and hers and the choice of whether to close it.
Elinor stepped back.
The night air rushed into the space she left, cool and sudden.
“You do not have to do this,” she said. Her voice was steady, but her hands gripped the balustrade behind her. “You do not have to protect me, Lucien. The engagement ends, and you are free. That was the agreement.”
She held his gaze for one more beat. Then she turned and walked back into the ballroom, her shoulders straight, her stride unhurried, every line of her body composed in the way shecomposed herself when she was holding something together through sheer force of will.
Lucien did not follow.
He stood on the terrace and gripped the stone railing and listened to the sounds of the ball swallowing her back into its noise. The music resumed. Laughter rose and fell. Somewhere inside, Lady Morland was watching, and Dominic was watching, and the ton was drawing its conclusions.
He stayed where he was. The night pressed against him, and the gardens stretched dark below, and the question she had asked still lived in the air.
Is that still what you want?
No. It was not. It had not been for a long time.
But wanting was not the same as deserving, and Lucien was not yet certain he had earned the right to close the distance she kept placing between them.
He stayed on the terrace until the cold drove him inside, and by then, she was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“My lady. A letter has arrived for you. Urgent. The rider waited.”
Natalie stood in the doorway of Elinor’s chamber, her face drawn. The letter in her hand bore her father’s seal, but the handwriting on the front was not his. It belonged to Mr. Thorne, his steward at Morland Hall, and that alone was enough to make Elinor’s stomach drop before she broke the wax.
She read it standing. Her fingers whitened on the paper.
My lady, I write with great reluctance to inform you that your father, Lord Morland, has taken a serious turn. The physician has attended him twice this week. His Lordship asked me not to trouble you, but I feel it is my duty to disregard that instruction. Please come at your earliest opportunity.
Elinor read it again. The words did not change.
She set the letter on her desk and began packing before her hands had stopped shaking. Natalie helped without being asked, pulling a traveling case from beneath the wardrobe, folding chemises and stockings while Elinor gathered what mattered: her father’s last letter, the celestial atlas, a change of dress.
She did not think about what she was leaving behind. She did not think about Lucien, or the terrace, or the conversation they had agreed to have before they ran out of time.
She thought about her father’s face the last time she had seen him, thinner than she remembered, his smile still reaching his eyes when he spoke about the night sky.
Newton watched the packing from the bed with his ears pricked, his tail flicking. When Elinor lifted him into the traveling case she used for his visits to Lyra House, he went without protest, as though he understood.
She found Rebecca in the morning room, seated with Belinda over a tray of correspondence.