Across the table, he was peripherally aware of Flynn lifting his cup with the expression of a man thoroughly pleased with the morning’s entertainment.
Tristan did not dignify it with a glance.
Chapter Seven
The breakfast was thinning.
Not quickly—these things never moved quickly, in Tristan’s experience, and he had sat through enough of them to know that the last guests always departed at least forty minutes after the last guest believed themselves to be departing. There was always one more toast, one more reminiscence, one moreelderly relation who had not yet said everything they wished to say to the bride.
His great-aunt Cordelia was currently saying a great deal to his bride.
Imogen, to her considerable credit, was listening with every appearance of genuine interest, her head tilted at precisely the angle of a woman who found the speaker charming. It was markedly different than how she’d held her head earlier while enduring a story from Lord Willbanks.
He was not certain whether the distinction was genuine or performed. He was finding, with increasing frequency, that he could not tell, and that this uncertainty occupied more of his attention than he wished to spare it.
The room had shifted into its later configuration—the men who had drifted briefly toward the port now drifting back, the women collecting shawls and gloves, the general quiet reconfiguration of forty-two people who had eaten and drunk and congratulated themselves on bearing witness to something rather extraordinary, and were now preparing to go home and tell everyone they knew about it.
Flynn had gone to speak to the bishop. The bishop, Tristan noted with relief, appeared to be leaving.
He turned to his wife.
She was still half-angled toward Cordelia, but her eyes slid to his with the immediate, peripheral awareness he had already come to expect from her—as though some part of her was always tracking him. Noticing him.
He’d be a damned liar if he said having her eyes on him wasn’t an enjoyable experience.
Cordelia patted her hand, rose with some ceremony, and was immediately intercepted by a nephew.
The space beside him settled into quiet.
“She told me,” Imogen said, reaching for what remained of her wine, “that your mother cried at every wedding she ever attended, including your cousin Gerald’s second one, which apparently nobody cried at, because nobody liked Gerald’s second wife.”
“Nobody liked Gerald’s second wife,” Tristan confirmed. “She put the fish course before the soup at every dinner for eleven years and refused to be corrected about it.”
Imogen pressed her lips together. “That is a very specific grievance.”
“I am a very specific man.”
She smiled at that, not the performed smile, not the calibrated bridal expression. A smaller thing, more involuntary, quickly suppressed.
He watched it happen.
“I find,” he said, after a moment, tilting his wine glass with a slight, idle motion, “that I have a question.”
She looked at him. “Only one?”
“The rest can wait.” He set the glass down. “This one has been with me since the carriage.”
Something in her posture adjusted almost imperceptibly—not quite a brace, but a preparation. He was coming to recognize that too. The small, internal gathering of herself that preceded any exchange she suspected might require her defenses.
“Ask it, then,” she said.
He looked at her directly. “Why?”
She waited.
“Not the explanation you gave me in the carriage,” he said. “I understood the mechanics. Eliza wanted to run off with her clerk and required a body at the altar to smooth the path. What I find I cannot reconcile—” He paused, selecting his words with care “—is you. Specifically, the part of you that agreed to it.”
“I told you. She is my dearest friend.”