"Mm."
"Thank you. For tonight." She turned then and looked at him directly across the small dark space of the carriage. There was something in her expression that was open in a way that caught him entirely off guard. Genevieve was warm and she was bright, but she was not, he had learned, unguarded without intention. "I know it was… I know there were reasons for it beyond simply an evening out. But I had a marvelous time, and I wanted you to know that."
He looked at her. The carriage lamp caught the green of her gown, the line of her collarbone, the particular quality of her attention when she was being entirely sincere. He was aware of the smallness of the space between them, the stillness of the carriage, the fact that there was nothing and no one requiring either of them to be anything in particular right now.
"I too had a marvelous time," he said, and his voice came out quieter than he had intended.
She held his gaze for a moment. He did not look away, which was a decision he made with slightly more deliberateness than he would have liked to admit.
Then the carriage turned onto the drive, the wheels crunching on familiar gravel, and the spell, if that was what it had been, and he was not quite ready to call it that, shifted into something that was still present but no longer pressing. She looked back toward the window. He looked at his hands.
He helped her down from the carriage in the dark, and her hand in his was warm and unhurried, and she looked up at him on the step with the lamp light behind her and said goodnight in a voice that was entirely ordinary and landed nowhere near ordinarily.
He watched her go inside.
He stood in the cold for a moment longer than was necessary, looking at the door she had gone through, with the particular feeling of a man who has been trying very hard not to want something and has just realized, with absolute and inconvenient clarity, that he has been failing at it for quite some time.
He went inside.
He did not sleep especially well.
Chapter 11
Caroline Wentworth arrived in the way she always arrived, which was to say without particular ceremony and with the immediate impression that whatever room she had just entered had been waiting for her to make it more interesting. She was shown into the drawing room where Genevieve was attempting to write a letter, had taken one look at her expression, and said, "Put the letter down and tell me what's wrong."
"Nothing is wrong," Genevieve said.
Caroline sat down and looked at her with the patient, careful attention of a woman who had known her for eleven years and was not remotely fooled.
Genevieve put the letter down.
"The ball was wonderful," she said, because it had been, and it seemed important to establish that first. "Truly wonderful. Thomas was… well, he was attentive, and kind, and he made me feel as though I was precisely where I was supposed to be, and we danced, and the carriage home was—" She stopped. "It was a lovely evening."
"But," Caroline said.
"But we came home," Genevieve said, "and the next morning he was at breakfast and he was perfectly pleasant and he asked how I had slept and made sure my tea was correct and then he went to his study, and I went to the accounts, and it was…" She searched for the word. "Fine. It was entirely fine."
"Fine," Caroline repeated, in the tone that indicated she understood completely and found it inadequate.
"We are like," Genevieve paused, looking for the right comparison and finding it uncomfortable when she did. "We are like very fond friends who happen to share a house. He is kind to me. He is genuinely, consistently, thoroughly kind to me, and I am grateful for it, truly, but it is the kindness of—" She stopped again.
"Of?" Caroline prompted gently.
"Of a brother," Genevieve said, and the word sat between them with more weight than she had intended. "He looks out for me the way a brother looks out for a younger sister he is fond of but not particularly worried about. He makes sure I am comfortable and well provided for and not troubled by anything, and then he goes back to his own life, which runs parallel to mine in every way and connects to it at mealtimes and occasionally in the evenings, while I…"
She looked at her hands. "I want more than parallel, Caroline. I want to actually know him. And I do not quite know how to go about it when he is so thoroughly, kindly, immovably at a distance."
Caroline was quiet for a moment. Outside, something was happening in the garden that involved the gardener and what sounded like a disagreement with a wheelbarrow. Genevieve ignored it.
"Can I tell you what I observe?" Caroline said.
"Please."
Caroline was quiet for a moment, in the way she was quiet when she was being honest rather than kind. "He laughed in the carriage?" she asked.
Genevieve blinked.
"Yes."