She was quiet. “You wanted to?”
He laughed roughly. “Yes.”
They were both silent. She fiddled with the petal of a rose.
“Constance—I don’t wish to pry, but if you were not there because you welcomed his attentions—” He bit off the words, unsure of exactly how to continue but needing, needing, to ask, because it was possible he had failed her in more ways than one, and he could not live with himself if he had.
“Lord Harlan has a reputation for …” He swallowed. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
Her face went dark. “No. Not as such.” She met his eye. “He was … briefly overexuberant in his attentions. I made my lack of enthusiasm clear and he did not continue.”
Overexuberant. He wanted to go find the man and pull him out of whatever club he was half-soused in and thrash him until he bled.
“You were right to warn me about him,” Constance added. “I wish I had listened.”
He leaned forward and took her by the shoulders.
“Just know that if you had said the words that day, I would have happily throttled him. And if you would like, I still can.”
“There is no need.” She glanced up at him, then smiled ever so slightly. “I stabbed him in the neck.”
He stared at her. “You stabbed Harlan Stoke in the neck?”
“Yes. With a very pretty silver fan.” She smirked, clearly pleased with herself. “I shall always treasure the memory.”
He bit his thumb and closed his eyes to try to keep from laughing.
“Sometimes, Lady Constance, you really are the woman of my dreams.”
“Thank you for finally realizing it,” she said primly. “I do have my attractions when I am not being cruel and monstrous.”
He sighed. “I’m so sorry that I made you feel that way. It’s beginning to be clear to me that I have been acting like an arse for far longer than I realized.”
She smiled tightly. Not in such a way that invited further conversation, but in such a way that made him feel she did not disagree with him.
Christ, if only he’d realized.
Could he have simply said what he’d wanted from the start? It was almost too painful to consider, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Constance, may I ask you a question?”
“Yes.”
“What did you hope would happen if you had succeeded in getting my attention? What did you want?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said lightly. “What do silly young maidens ever want when they develop brief infatuations with unsuitable young men? Fond words? A poem?”
She looked away and spoke less archly. “Perhaps a correction to our encounter in the garden maze?”
Of course. He’d been so stupid.
“I wonder if it’s too late to make it up to you.” Impulsively, he reached over and tipped her head toward him, and kissed her on the lips.
Just lightly. Chastely.
The way he might have when she was seventeen.
She sighed and closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry that it took me so many years to get around to that,” he murmured, rubbing her slightly parted lower lip with his thumb. “It seems I’m not as perceptive as I ought to be. Next time, just tell me what it is you want.”
“All right, children,” Rosecroft’s voice boomed from the terrace doors behind them. “That’s enough. Lovers’ quarrel is officially over.”
Reluctantly, he moved away from Constance.
She stood up. She was smiling.
“Thank you for the unsightly flowers, Lord Apthorp,” she said, formally executing an exaggerated curtsy for the benefit of Rosecroft, who was now observing with his arms folded over his chest. “I shall cherish them.”
She leaned in and dropped her voice so his cousin couldn’t overhear. “And what I want, Julian, my dear friend, is for you to kiss me again the way you did in the powdering closet.”
With that, she winked, took her flowers under her arm, and flounced out of the room.
“Seems she forgives you,” Rosecroft drawled. “Now we can all live happily ever after.”
Apthorp winced, trying to pretend that it was that simple, and knowing that it wasn’t.
And yet, as he walked back along the dark streets to the Strand, he could not help but wonder what might happen if he did the wild, illogical, wrongheaded thing he now suddenly could not stop imagining.
Simply asking her for what he’d always wanted.
Chapter 10
“Entrez,” Valeria Parc commanded, ushering Constance inside the door of her small boutique in a swirl of scarlet silk. “And stop slouching.”
Most mantua-makers were known for flattering their customers. Valeria Parc was not like most mantua-makers.
Constance followed her inside, inhaling the fragrance of fresh violets that always wafted from Valeria’s pile of glossy black hair. The floral note was in striking contrast to her air of menace.
Valeria led her to a cloth-covered platform in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, positioning her just so until she stood in a shaft of sunlight. “Stand here.” Her green eyes flashed in the mirror as she flicked them over every nook of Constance’s figure, taking measurements with her eyes.
“You’ve lost at least an inch of bosom.”
This was not a compliment. Valeria was a great proponent of bosoms.
“Oh, what’s a bit of bosom?” Constance said, turning away from the sight of her own reflection. In truth, her figure was reduced. Her appetite tended to fluctuate with her mood. When she was happy, she celebrated with cake and cream teas from morning till night; when she was unnerved, she ate nothing.
She had not had a proper meal in a week.
Valeria took her chin in her hand, examining her face.
“You lack verve. Are you ill?”
She was not ill, only exhausted. Her custom of sleeping until luncheon had given way to restless predawn dreams that left her feeling hot and incomplete and unable to fall back to sleep. Distressed.
Distressed about the most unlikely thing in history: kissing the Earl of Apthorp.
She tried for a breezy smile. “I am only tired from the excitement of preparing for my wedding. I trust in your abilities to restore me to beauty. I shall convert my brother’s entire fortune into gowns if that’s what it takes.”
Valeria gave her a grim smile, for she enjoyed discussion of material enrichment nearly as much as she enjoyed probing Constance’s spine with her hard, pointy fingers.
“And how is your Lord Apthorp?”
Constance winced as the dressmaker tugged at her stays. “Very well. I think.”
In truth she’d barely seen him since he’d shown up bearing a sad expression and a deformed bouquet in a gesture so touching and romantic she could not believe she had not concocted it herself. He and Westmead had spent the week furiously crisscrossing town to secure votes for the bill; on the few occasions she had seen him, it had been in public, and they’d done little except perform fondness at each other from across dining tables and crowded rooms.
Yet whenever she caught sight of him, her breath hitched in a way that was difficult to cover up. It felt as though she risked propriety by merely looking at him from afar, because whenever she did so, she could not stop imagining him touching her.