He wondered which ones she was discarding.
“It is so generous of you to share your expertise on the subject of love. Perhaps you ought to write a book on it as well.”
“If I feel that life has gotten dull for want of suffering, I shall certainly do that.”
He could sense her smiling.
He finally signed his name with a flourish and reached for the sander.
“Do you miss your wife?”
He went still.
Then he pulled his arm slowly away from the sander and straightened. A quick flame of anger flickered, a certain reflexive imperious resentment at being so deftly cornered.
He was a bloody castle.
And she, like a wildflower, had been seeking out the chinks between the stones from the beginning.
To what end?
But of course he knew.
He ought to stop it now.
Her gaze was steady. But she hadn’t his years of expertise with cold inscrutability. He found himself unaccountably moved by the cant of her chin; it betrayed a little uncertainty of her own presumption. She was poised to turn her question into a jest should he decide to deflect it.
Odd to think of her as an innocent, this girl who’d willfully taken a lover. In many ways she was.
He fiercely disliked the realization that, in some ways, at the age of forty-three . . . so was he.
Not only that, but possibly also a little awkward.
He was buffeted between two things: what he knew were the right things to do and say, and where he, the ruthless strategist, could lead this conversation if he so chose. Which was to the room adjacent, where a bed was.
He found himself turning slightly away, toward the window. The water seemed a safer view than her green eyes. He told himself that she’d asked a question, and he owed her an answer.
This was, after all, their bargain.
His breathing seemed too audible suddenly.
Two breaths were all he allowed himself before he answered.
“At the time of my wife’s death,” he said, carefully, the words maneuvering around the forces of reason that attempted to stop them, “we had not lived together for nearly eight years. She was the daughter of a viscount. She preferred the city, near her family. I preferred the country. I was often away on campaign during our marriage. I have reason to believe she was satisfied with the arrangement. And I . . .” He gave a small, humorless smile. “I confess that I was, too.”
It was unlike him to cushion bald truths. But this one, he knew, would ring brutally in the quiet room:
He didn’t miss his wife.
He wasn’t going to say that out loud.
He didn’t want to say it because he couldn’t anticipate how Miss Wylde’s expression would change, because of a certainty it would. He didn’t think he would ever forget the muffled anguish in her voice when she’d spoken of the duel, as though she hadn’t mattered at all to them. It had been yet another offhand, crushing erasure of a woman by a man.
Mariana had taken a lover and enjoyed him and left him. And still she hadn’t mattered much to him at all.
It did not solve my loneliness, she’d said.
It seemed impossible to believe in this quiet room with the light pouring in that the woman sitting across from him had wound up in the middle of chaos, scandal, and bloodshed, in part because, once upon a time, she’d attempted to solve it.
He was now on guard.
Because his admission had introduced into the room the phantoms of lovers he’d had in those eight years. Not many. Never for more than a night. Nevertheless, he’d hardly been celibate. She knew this must be true, of course.
He’d revealed this deliberately.
And, of course, it was this she had sought to uncover.
He was mordantly amused to realize that he wasn’t much accustomed to considering himself an object of desire outside of his title and money. It had never mattered.
Loneliness was so much a part of him now that at times it seemed to be the inalienable force, like gravity, that held him to the earth. The invisible plinth that held him up and apart from everyone else. It was simply the fact of who he was. It came along with the supposed greatness.
He undeniably missed the fact of his wife. They had not been compatible; Eliza had neither loved nor understood him, not after the first flush of infatuation so many years ago, but they had not been enemies. He didn’t know whether she’d ever taken a lover, but he would not have begrudged her that comfort. He knew only gratitude that if she had, she’d clearly been discreet. But he missed the fact of a life with all of the parts he thought it should have: a duchess, a family, a title, a fortune, property, a legacy. He’d had all of them, once. But they’d been like a collection in a cabinet. He supposed, long ago in his callow youth, he’d thought they’d be more like a garden. Like lush rolling green fields, growing, surrounding, sustaining him.
“I miss the life we once had in the early days, before the war, when my son was small. And I know my son misses her greatly.”
He turned to look at her again.
She was regarding him with a warmth so new to his experience that it altered his breathing. He could not look away. He ought to. He didn’t think he deserved it.
“And that’s why their miniatures are on your table. So they can look across at each other, and not be alone,” she said.
He stared at her in surprise.
“Yes,” he said finally. Quietly.
They heard the rattle of the tea tray as Dot made her careful journey down the hall.
The news wasn’t entirely good.
Then again, she chose to think it wasn’t entirely bad, either.
“We’ve sold five tickets.”
Mariana appreciated the way Lord Bolt delivered this news without editorial. Though five out of a hundred available tickets—she didn’t need any formal training in “maths,” as the duke had put it, to know this wasn’t ideal for an event scheduled for less than a month away.
It seemed there was a bit of tension at White’s between gentlemen who had grown quite fond of the reformed Lord Bolt and truly wanted to attend a fine musical evening and didn’t want to offend him; and those who were well acquainted with Lord Kilhone, Lord Revell, and their fathers, and didn’t want to offend them; and those who were jealous of Lord Revell because he’d once been the lover of a pretty opera singer. Then there were those who could not be dissuaded from the notion that she was a harlot and would never pay to see her even if she sang like a nightingale.
The sum of this conflict apparently was five tickets.
Lord Bolt shared all of this in detail with Angelique and Delilah and Captain Hardy. Miss Wylde was given a kinder, sparer version of the truth.
She was no fool. She could certainly surmise what was going on.
Sergeant Massey, a personal friend of Captain Hardy’s who lived in Dover, would be in town with his wife, Emily, through the end of the month, and he’d purchased two of the tickets.
Still, she wasn’t displeased that three possible strangers had purchased tickets to see her. Perhaps it was only the beginning. It was insupportable to think of it in any other way.
She looked into Mrs. Hardy’s and Mrs. Durand’s faces. They did not seem at all bowed.
There was one more thing she needed to ask, though she suspected she knew the answer to this, too.
“Did you speak to the string quartet I told you about? I think they may agree to play for forty minutes in exchange for standing them a round or three at The Wolf And. After the show,” she added hurriedly.