Chapter 5 #2
“My parents are not at home at the moment, Your Grace,” Emily said. She stood in the center of the drawing room, her hands clasped loosely in front of her. “I am afraid your visit is ill-timed if you intended to speak with my papa.”
Theodore handed his hat to the butler and followed Emily further into the drawing room. “I would have liked to say hello to them,” he said. “Another time, perhaps.” He glanced at her. “ We can talk instead. I came to see you, Emily.”
Emily gave him the look she reserved specifically for him, the one that sat somewhere between mild irritation and a deep, practiced patience. “How gracious of you, Your Grace.”
“I thought so.”
She gestured to the chair across from the settee and sat down, folding her hands in her lap. She was in pale green today, a morning dress with simple lines and no particular ornamentation, her dark hair neatly pinned, every inch of her finely arranged.
Theodore sat and looked at her calmly. She looked, he thought, exactly like herself.
Which was to say she looked composed and entirely in control of her immediate surroundings.
The pale green suited her in the way that simple things suited people who did not need assistance from their clothing.
Her posture was, as always, impeccable. Her expression was, as always, pleasantly unreadable.
Then there were the freckles.
They were always the thing that caught him slightly off guard, no matter how many times he had been in the same room as her.
A scatter of them across the bridge of her nose and onto her cheeks, light and unassuming, the kind that belonged on someone who laughed easily, spent afternoons in gardens, and did not spend considerable energy being this relentlessly composed.
They were entirely at odds with the rest of her.
They belonged, he had thought more than once, to a completely different woman.
Someone softer. Someone who did not hold herself like she was bracing for something.
On Emily Pierce, they were deeply incongruous. He found them oddly entertaining.
“You are staring,” Emily said, without looking up from her hands.
“I am observing,” Theodore said. “There is a distinction.”
“Is there?”
“Your freckles...” he said. “...do not match the rest of you.”
Emily looked up. “I beg your pardon?”
“They do not fit. That’s the best way I can put it,” he said simply, gesturing vaguely at her face. “Everything else about you is very precisely arranged, but then there are the freckles, just sitting there, entirely unbothered by all of it.” He tilted his head.
Emily stared at him. “You came to my home... to comment on my freckles?”
“I came to your home to talk,” he said. “I am merely observing things while we begin.”
“My freckles are not a subject of conversation, Your Grace,” Emily said, with great composure.
“They are perfectly pleasant freckles. I meant it as a compliment.”
“It did not arrive as one.”
“Most compliments require a certain openness to receive,” Theodore said pleasantly. “You might try it sometime.”
Emily looked at him for a long moment. “Was there something you wanted to discuss, Your Grace? Or shall we continue talking about my face?”
Theodore smiled. “Your face is a perfectly good place to start.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at her, the smile still in place but something shifting behind it, the way light shifts when a cloud moves across it. “There is something I think you should know,” he said.
Emily looked at him. “What is it?”
“I am not looking for a wife,” he said.
Emily said nothing.
“I want to be clear about that,” he continued.
“Whatever Julia has told you, whatever the list suggests, whatever the dance and my gesture may have implied to the people who were watching doesn’t matter.
” He held her gaze. “I am not in the market. I have never been in the market, and even if I were...” he paused. “...It would not be a love match.”
He watched her face. Watched for the flicker, the small fracture in the composure that would tell him the words had landed where he intended them to land.
He thought about Alistair. About the evening, two Seasons ago now, when his friend had come to him, ambushed by his own feelings, and did not know what to do with them.
Theodore had laughed at him, affectionately, because that was just how he was.
He had not taken Alistair seriously. But he recalled that Emily had.
She had been the one who had listened, encouraged, and told Alistair that love was worth it.
That a love match was the only match worth having.
He had heard her say it himself. Not to him, never to him, but to Yvette at one of the Pembourne dinners, when the women had somehow drifted onto the subject the way women did. She wanted a love marriage.
So, he was counting on his words. On the fact that telling her this was no love match would be enough to send her back to her drawing room and her callers and whatever other options she had available to her, because Emily Pierce did not compromise on things she believed in.
Or so he had thought.
“I do not care about a love match,” Emily said.
Theodore looked at her.
“What?”
“A love match,” she said again, evenly. “I do not require one. I do not expect it from you.”
He studied her face. “You have said, on more than one occasion, that you would not marry someone you do not love.”
“I have said a great many things,” Emily said. “People change their minds.”
“Not about that,” Theodore said. “Not you. You told Alistair that love was the only reason worth —”
“I told Alistair what was true for him at the time,” Emily said. “I meant it. He needed to hear it, and it was true.” She paused. “That was then.”
“What about now?”
She looked at him directly, without flinching. “Now I need a husband,” she said. “A practical one. A powerful one. You said you are not looking for a wife. I am not asking you to look. I am asking you to consider what is already in front of you.”
Theodore looked at her for a long moment.
She was lying. Not about the practicality, not about needing a husband, those parts were true, and he could see that plainly. But something else was sitting behind her eyes, something she had packed carefully away before he arrived, and what she was showing him now was not the whole of it.
He knew it the way he knew most things about people, not from what they said but from the particular quality of how they said it. Emily was giving him the version of herself she had decided he should have. The practical, unsentimental, clear-eyed version.
It did not fit her any better than the freckles fit her person.
“You do not mean that,” he said quietly.
“I mean every word of it,” she said.
“You mean the words,” he said. “I am less certain you mean what is behind them.”
“You are deflecting, Your Grace.”
“I am confused,” he said, honestly. He truly couldn’t understand what was happening. “You are confusing me.”
Emily straightened and looked at him. “Court me,” she said.
Theodore blinked.
“That is all I am asking,” she said. “If you don’t want to marry me, then court me. If it comes to nothing, then I will have other prospects simply from having been courted by you. A duke. One who famously wanted nothing to do with marriage. That alone will bring callers back to my door.”
Theodore stared at her.
He had come here to discourage her. He had prepared for resistance, for feeling, for the version of Emily that believed in love matches and would not be moved. He had not prepared for this, for a woman sitting across from him, dismantling his discouragement with calm, methodical efficiency.
“You have thought about this,” he said.
“I have thought about very little else,” she said honestly.
Theodore sat back, watching this version of her that was cooler, more deliberate, and considerably harder to read. He did not like it.
Not because it was unimpressive. It was impressive.
That was rather the problem. But underneath the impressive composure, something sat that he could not reach, and it bothered him the way locked doors did.
He did not necessarily need to know what was behind a locked door, but he did not like not knowing.
He turned his head slightly. Then he smiled.
“The child,” he said conversationally. “Is it yours?”
Emily's eyes sharpened. “You cannot ask me that.”
“I think I can,” he said, keeping his voice entirely pleasant. “I have been wondering. You have not said a lot about this child, and I find that I am curious.” He tilted his head. “Is it yours?”
“That is an extraordinarily impertinent question.”
“It is a reasonable one, given the circumstances.”
“It is none of your concern.”
“You are asking me to consider marrying you,” Theodore said. “I would argue it is entirely my concern.”
“Well, are you going to marry me?” she retorted. A muscle in her jaw moved, just once.
Theodore looked at her. “I have not decided.”
“Then until you decide,” Emily said. “It is not your concern, Your Grace.”
“That is not how this works.”
“That is precisely how this works,” she said. “You do not get information about my private affairs simply by expressing a vague interest in possibly considering the idea of perhaps one day making a decision.”
“A vague interest?” Theodore repeated. “I danced with you twice.”
“You danced with Lady Cecily Hartwell for the better part of an hour at the Alderton ball,” Emily said. “I do not imagine she received a full accounting of your private affairs.”
Theodore opened his mouth, then closed it.
“The child is my concern,” Emily said. “My responsibility. That is all you need to know at this stage.”
“At this stage?” he said. “So there are stages.”
“There are always stages.”
“All right, and at what stage precisely do I get to know anything of substance?”
“When it is relevant,” she said.
“It is relevant now.”
“You just said you were not interested in marrying me.”
“I might consider it, if you stop hiding things!”
“It is relevant...” Emily said, then stopped to take a deep breath.
“It is relevant when there is something concrete between us that makes it relevant. Right now, you have not committed to anything. You have not agreed to court me. You have not agreed to anything at all.” She held his gaze.
“So at this stage, with respect, you are simply a man sitting in my drawing room.”
Theodore stared at her. “A man sitting in your drawing room?” he repeated slowly.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“I am a duke.”
“Fine. You are a duke sitting in my drawing room,” Emily said. “The title does not change the absence of commitment. Do you have commitment issues, Your Grace?”
Theodore scoffed and placed his palm on his forehead. He thought to himself that Emily Pierce was, without a doubt, the most infuriating woman he had ever sat across from.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” he asked.
“That is not your concern.”
“How old?”
“Not your concern.”
“Is the child —” he began.
“Not...” Emily said. “...your concern. Your Grace.”
Theodore leaned forward slightly, his elbows on his knees, and looked at her with direct attention. He studied her face. The steadiness of it. The way she held his gaze without blinking, without shifting, without giving him so much as a thread to pull.
She was very good at this, he noted to himself.
“You are hiding something,” he said.
“You have said that before. I want you to make a decision. Court me or do not court me. Those are the options available to you.” She tilted her head slightly. “Everything else follows from that.”
He was still looking at her when he heard something. A small sound. Barely anything. Like a soft, hesitant creak of a door that had been pushed open by someone who had not intended to be heard.
Theodore turned at the same time Emily looked behind her. She seemed to have seen something he did not. She was looking at it just beyond the drawing room door.
He followed her gaze.
The door was open perhaps four inches. No more than that. Just enough to suggest that someone on the other side of it had pushed it and then thought better of the decision.
Emily rose from the settee.
“I need to excuse myself, Your Grace,” she said.
Theodore looked at her. Then at the door. Then back at her. “But I have not finished.”
“I have something to attend to. My apologies,” she said. She was already moving, not quickly, not in a way that would look like flight.
“You have a habit,” Theodore said. “A habit of dismissing me.”
“That is not my intention.” She stopped. Turned. Looked at him. Then she curtsied. “Your Grace.”
With that, she walked hurriedly towards the door and slipped out.
Theodore stood in the middle of the drawing room for a moment. The door she had gone through was slightly ajar, and the house beyond it was quiet. He looked at the chair she had been sitting in, the cup of tea on the table beside it that she had not touched since he arrived.
A small scoff left his lips. He was a duke.
He was, by most available measures, one of the most sought-after men in all of London.
Women did not leave him mid-conversation to attend to things.
Women did not curtsy at him and walk away as though he were a mildly interesting painting they had finished looking at.
“Unbelievable,” he mumbled.
He walked to the door, paused with his hand on the frame, and looked back at the empty room. She had not even looked back.
He dismissed the thought before it fully formed. It was not a thought worth having. It was not a thought that meant anything. He did not require Emily Pierce's undivided attention. He did not require anyone's undivided attention. He was, if anything, relieved to leave.
He was almost entirely sure he was relieved.