That produced another of her mysterious smiles. “An inconvenient character trait for a man in your position.”
“Character flaw, ye mean.”
“Not necessarily.” She regarded him like he was a problem she’d eventually have to solve, neither agreeing with his estimation, nor rushing to assure him of the severity of his self-assessment.
With no forthcoming placations or condemnations, Ramsay couldn’t be certain what she thought of him. As a man who’d made his fortune examining people under a microscope, tearing apart their lies, and meting out their sentences, he found her peculiar inscrutability disconcerting.
Why did he even care if she held him in her esteem?
The answer was simple. Because he wanted her. He … liked her.
“Are ye ill, Miss Teague?” Her ghostly pallor concerned him, and her fingers trembled slightly on his arm.
“Why do you ask?”
“Yer headache.”
“Oh.” Her mouth thinned into a frown as if she’d forgotten her headache existed. “I’ve had a trying day, my lord,” was all she gave by way of explanation. “I’m sure some rest will put me to rights.”
She walked for a moment in silence, turning his own weapon upon himself.
Which could be the only fathomable reason why he blurted, “Why are ye not married, Miss Teague?”
She hesitated. “A woman may not marry if she is not asked.”
“Ye’ve never been asked?”
“What about you, my lord?” she quickly volleyed. “I can imagine only few women in this city who wouldn’t leap at the chance to be your wife.”
“I’ve spent too much of my life dodging the shrapnel of my family’s rather famously disastrous marriages to have any desire to embark on my own.”
She nodded, though his statement seemed to trouble her. “But don’t you believe there’s someone for everyone?”
“Quite the contrary,” he scoffed. “I believe there’s no one for anyone. I’m not one to believe in soul mates and kismet, Miss Teague. Marriage is just like anything else of its nature. A legal binding contract between two people.”
She paused beneath a bower of lilacs, replacing the sky with blooming violet flowers that complemented her gown. “What about love?” she asked.
“What about it?”
“Do you not believe in love?”
“I suppose I do,” he replied, though he interrupted her relieved sigh by continuing, “I believe love is a construct of people to explain away their biological urges and unreasonable attachments to each other. It’s a word that can explain away otherwise unexplainable behavior.”
She regarded him ruefully. “Unreasonable attachments? Surely you don’t feel that way about the duke and Alexandra? They’re undeniably in love.”
“They’re besotted, I won’t deny that, but their attachment is young. Life hasn’t yet had a chance to rip them away from themselves. From each other.”
She shook her head slowly as though she couldn’t believe him. “I just—don’t understand how you can be so … so … cynical.”
Ramsay shrugged. “Years of practice, I suppose.”
To his utter surprise, she laughed.
And even in the dark, her laughter felt like sunlight on his skin.
He was disconcerted enough by the sensation not to commit to the threatening smile twitching at the corner of his lips.
“I’ve found it’s better to be cynical than to be naive,” he asserted. “Safer.”
Her regard turned wary. “Are you implying I’m naive simply for believing in love? Because I’ll have you know, I’ve seen some of the worst humanity has to offer.”
“Is that so?” He highly doubted she’d suffered more trials than a broken bootlace. Her smile was much too genuine. Her eyes sparkled with curiosity and mirth, unhaunted and dauntless. Her clothes were expensive, and she ate well enough to keep her body delectably round. He searched her gaze for grief. For shadows. For the pain that makes one cold. Or hard.
Or in his case, both.
All he found were sapphires sparkling in moonlight refracted by glass and silver wire. Suddenly, his fingers itched to take off her spectacles. To see if her eyes were truly so deep an azure, and her lashes a fan of such a distracting hue.
“I’ve seen the worst,” she repeated with absolute conviction. “And I wouldn’t at all consider myself credulous. I’m merely…”
“Romantic?”
“Optimistic,” she offered.
“Idealistic, you mean.”
She shook her head. “More … hopeful.”
He grunted. “Hope. The currency of dreamers.”
A little frown pinched her brow. “And what’s wrong with that?”
He fought to maintain his mask of impassivity as a familiar hollow, wintry feeling rose within him. “Dreams die.”
“Everything dies.” She shrugged her insouciance over that fact, threading her fingers around some lilac blossoms. “But dreams are full of hope, and without hope, my lord, you might as well hang us all on your gallows, for we’ve no reason to be human anymore.”
It took him longer than he liked to absorb her meaning, and he didn’t have time to process the effect her words had upon him. So he deflected.
“What is it ye hope for?” he wondered. “A husband?”
“Lord, no!” This time she laughed long enough to be slightly insulting.
“But ye believe in love? Someone for everyone and so on, but doona wish it for yerself?”
“Love and marriage have little to do with each other, I’ve noticed,” she replied. “And I don’t think I shall ever be shackled with a husband, thank Jove. But I fully intend to fall in love.”
When he didn’t reply, she examined him intently, as though she attempted to read the answers in his bones. “I’m interested to learn the reason you inquired about my marital status at all, my lord,” she challenged. “It’s either a cruel inquiry or a meaningful one.”
He both admired and was irritated at her direct assertion because … it was both cruel and meaningful.
“It’s a question ye still havena answered,” he prompted.
She crossed defensive arms over her breasts, deepening the cleft between them. “My answer might offend.”
“I promise to remain unoffended,” he vowed, valiantly keeping his gaze from drifting beneath her chin.
She made a sound of disbelief in the back of her throat before conceding. “For a woman of my means, marriage is inexorably less beneficial in all ways than my life as a spinster.”
“How so?”
“My property and my money remain my own. My will and reputation, as well. I am not a part of the aristocracy and so I am able to move more freely about the world. I ask permission from no one, and take nobody’s opinions, emotions, or”—she lifted meaningful eyebrows at him—“judgments into account when I make decisions. I am free, my lord, and have not yet met a man to whom I am inclined to give up that freedom.”
“Freedom.” Ramsay’s satisfied nod seemed to baffle her. “How incredibly odd, Miss Teague, that our reasons for remaining unattached so closely resemble each other’s.” Stranger still, that he’d never felt freer to be himself than in her presence.