Suddenly his gaze was a little too direct.
“I suppose it’s not,” she said carefully. “A bit like cursing in the parlor. One feels one ought to put a pence in the jar if they say the word.”
“Or rather like Delacorte’s gastric emissions after a rich meal. It rather irrevocably alters the mood and the course of conversation.”
“Perhaps in salons,” she suggested. “In an intellectual fashion, such a thing is discussed.”
“Oh,salons,” he said darkly, as though he had a whole silo full of grudges against them.
She covered a laugh with her hand.
It hurt to laugh because here was clearly something he couldn’t quite accommodate, could not squelch with irony or defuse with humor. She knew full well that some wounds could not be vanquished. Some old wounds never did heal and you just learned to adjust them, the way you would adjust a burden on a long journey.
“It’s a lens,” he said.
“What is a lens, pray tell?”
“Love is. You see everything through it, and then when you learn it is false, you are forced to recast everything in your life in a new light. Everything.”
She didn’t know how to navigate this mood. He was the one who was good at untangling things. She was good at waiting.
And so she waited.
“I saw my father today,” he said finally.
“Ah. The duke.”
“Oh, yes. The duke.” Every letter of that word was literally forged in irony.
“Well, from the state of you I’m going to guess it went very well.”
He looked up at her and his smile flashed in the near dark like a shooting star.
“Ispoketo him, too. I did not merely gaze upon him from afar.”
“Well.”
She thought it best to let him tell her about it, a bit at a time.
“Angelique, my friend. I am going to say the word again, because I’ve had just enough brandy for it. Do you know what it is to love someone... and to believe that they love you, too... but then learn that this love never existed?”
Her breath left her.
Of all the things he could have said. It was a bit like taking a scythe to the knees.
If she hadn’t already been sitting, she might have been forced to sink melodramatically to the settee. She curled her fist beneath her for balance.
She breathed in.
Breathed out.
Why should one word, so honest and raw, frighten her so? If she said “yes,” she’d open a door, and he would shoulder his way through. But he was hurting, and what he needed was to know she understood.
“Yes.”
His head slowly turned toward her. He regarded her with less surprise than she’d expected. With a warmth, an intensity, that she almost turned away from because she could feel it penetrate the gauze of her reserve right into the raw heart of her.
And then he shocked her again.