Chapter 6 #3
“Miss Euphemia.” Emily took one small step forward. “Why do they call you and your sisters... the Byron sisters?”
Euphemia stilled.
“You are not related,” Emily continued, gently. “You have different surnames. Different fathers, yet you call yourselves sisters, and you call yourselves Byron.” She tilted her head. “Where did that come from?”
Euphemia looked at her for a long moment. Something passed through those wide blue eyes, something that was layered and old and not at all what Emily had expected to find there.
Then she curtsied and walked away without a word.
Emily stood where she was and watched her go. Watched the gold of her hair disappear into the crowd, the straight careful line of her back, the way she moved like someone who had learned to take up exactly as much space as was necessary and not a fraction more.
She wanted to know her. There was something in that face, beneath the rehearsed composure and the darting eyes, that suggested a person who had a great deal to say and had simply never been given a room safe enough to say it in.
She was still thinking about it, still turning the Byron question over in her mind like a smooth stone, when a hand settled at the small of her back.
“You have that look,” Theodore said, somewhere near her ear.
Emily came back to the room in one breath.
“What look?” she asked.
“The one where you are thinking about something you have no intention of telling me.” His hand was still at her waist. He had not moved it. She was aware of this in the way one is aware of a fire in a room, not looking directly at it but feeling its warmth regardless. “Who was that?”
“Nobody of consequence,” she answered.
“You watched her walk away for quite a long time for someone of no consequence.”
Emily turned slightly to look at him. He was closer than she had realized, close enough that turning brought her face near his shoulder, and she had to tilt her chin upward to meet his eyes. He looked, as he always looked, entirely comfortable in his own existence.
She straightened. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough,” he said pleasantly.
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the answer you are getting.” His hand shifted slightly at her waist, not moving away, just settling differently, and she felt it travel all the way up her spine before she had the presence of mind to attribute it to irritation and leave it there.
“We are pretending, Emily. Remember?” he said to her. “Relax your shoulders. You do not have to look so uncomfortable.”
Emily looked at him. “You do not need to practice on me when there is nobody watching.”
“Who says nobody is watching?”
She glanced around the room. He was not wrong. Several pairs of eyes had found them with the assessing interest of people who had heard the rumor and were looking for evidence of it.
She turned back to him and smiled. It was a good smile. Warm and natural and entirely constructed. “Then perhaps you should say something amusing,” she said, through it. “So we look like two people who are enjoying each other's company.”
“We could try actually enjoying each other's company,” Theodore said. “As a novel alternative.”
“Merrick!”
The voice came from behind them, and Emily felt Theodore go still for a fraction of a second before he turned, his hand leaving her waist in the same motion, and the warmth that had been sitting there went with it, causing her to feel cold all of a sudden.
Alistair Locke, the Duke of Pembourne, was crossing the room toward them, his wife, Yvette’s, hand tucked through his arm. Beside him, a step behind, came another couple, the man dark-haired and broad-shouldered.
Emily felt the smile on her face become real before she could stop it.
“Yvette,” she said.
Yvette Locke detached herself from her husband's arm like she had been waiting to do exactly that and crossed the remaining distance to take both of Emily's hands in hers.
She was small and bright-eyed and had the particular quality of making every room she walked into feel warmer than it had been before she arrived.
“You look absolutely beautiful,” Yvette said, squeezing her hands. “We have a lot to discuss. What is this I hear about you and His Grace?”
“Well..” Emily said and giggled. “It all happened so fast.”
“Mm,” Yvette said and squinted her eyes. It looked as though she was not entirely convinced but was too fond of Emily to say so directly.
Alistair reached them and clapped Theodore on the shoulder. “I did not believe it until I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. “Theodore Merrick. Courting. Actually...courting a lady.”
“Your faith in me is touching,” Theodore said.
“It is not faith. It is astonishment.” Alistair turned to Emily with a smile that was genuine and easy and carried nothing complicated in it, the smile of a man who had made peace with the past and found it left a great deal of room for warmth. “Emily. You look wonderful, as always.”
“As do you, Your Grace,” Emily said. “Marriage suits you.”
“Yvette suits me,” he corrected pleasantly. “You have apparently achieved what the rest of London could not.” He turned to Theodore. “So... Marriage?”
Theodore looked at him. “I’m thinking about it.”
“You?” Alistair pointed at him with some emphasis. “Are getting married?”
“Don’t sound so shocked, Alistair.”
Theodore shifted beside her as he said it, and his hand found the small of her back.
Emily did not look at him. She kept her eyes on Alistair, her smile exactly where it was, and her breathing entirely her own business.
The hand was warm. That was all she was willing to acknowledge about it.
Warm and steady and sitting at the precise spot where her spine made its most inconvenient decisions.
She kept her eyes on Alistair. She kept her smile in place. She kept every single thing exactly where it belonged.
She was very good at keeping things where they belonged.
But the problem was that she was too aware.
The warmth of his palm seeped through the silk of her gown.
The slight pressure of it, not holding her so much as anchoring her.
She was perfectly composed and perfectly comfortable, and the only evidence to the contrary was the fact that she had taken a breath approximately four seconds ago and had not quite finished it yet.
She breathed out. Quietly. Evenly.
Alistair tilted his head to the side. “Theodore, you told me at my own wedding that the institution was a beautiful fiction best appreciated from the outside —”
“I was being poetic,” Theodore said. His thumb moved once against the small of her back. Barely anything. The smallest possible motion. She was not certain he had even done it deliberately.
She was absolutely certain she had felt it.
“You were being insufferable,” Alistair said pleasantly. “Which in your case is often the same thing.”
Theodore opened his mouth.
“He has completely changed his mind,” Emily said.
Theodore looked at her. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair that the evening had loosened back from her face, a gesture so natural that she felt something move in her stomach.
“I have,” he agreed, looking at her. His voice had dropped slightly. “How could I possibly not?”
Her heart did something it had absolutely no business doing in that moment, and she was certain he had seen it... seen her chest rise sharply in that moment.
She attributed it to the performance. They were performing. That was what this was, and that was all it was, and her heart was simply caught up in the authenticity of the thing, which was, if anything, a testament to how well they were both doing.
She smiled at him. He smiled back.
Yvette made a small, involuntary sound beside her that might have been a sigh. “I mean, everyone can see the attraction between you, too,” she said. “I’m sure Alistair is just surprised. We were all surprised when we heard. But it is a good thing. Love is always a good thing.”
“I need a drink,” Alistair announced, walking away. “Possibly several.”
Yvette shook her head and took Emily’s hand again. “Pay him no mind. He is protective of those he cares about. He knows His Grace rather well, which is precisely why he is watching you both so carefully.”
“Thank you, Yvette.”
Yvette squeezed her hand once and released it, and a moment later she and Alistair had slipped back into the warm current of the evening.
The space they left behind felt suddenly quiet, despite the swell of the orchestra and the voices competing for air.
Theodore didn't move. His hand remained anchored to the small of her back, the heat of his palm seeping through the layers of her gown as if he had forgotten it was there.
Or, more likely, as if he simply had no intention of letting go.
They stood in silence for a few seconds, a strange, breathless pocket of time where the performance was no longer for the benefit of an audience.
Theodore turned his head slightly, his gaze dropping to hers with an intensity that made the room feel as though it were tilting.
“One more dance,” he said. “Before the carriage is called. We should give them one final image to dismantle over their breakfast tomorrow.”
Emily looked up at him, her heart doing that inconvenient, stuttering skip again. “One more,” she agreed, her voice barely a whisper. “I suppose we must maintain the momentum.”
He offered a short, sharp nod, his fingers tightening briefly against her waist before he finally withdrew his hand. The sudden absence of his warmth felt like a draft.
“I have a few associates I must acknowledge before the night is through,” he said, stepping back. “I shall find you when the final set begins. Do try not to look so much like a woman plotting a murder in the meantime.”
“I shall do my best, Your Grace,” she retorted, though the bite was missing from her tone.
She watched him walk away, his shoulders broad as he navigated the crowd. Left alone, Emily felt the full pressure of the evening settle onto her shoulders. She stood there, her fingers tracing the spot on her ribs where his hand had been, her mind racing.
She wasn't quite certain she was capable of sustaining this. The acting, the calculated smiles, the way she had to lean into a man who was both her greatest irritant and her only hope. It was exhausting.
Yet, she had pulled it off. She had seen the look in Alistair’s eyes and the genuine warmth in Yvette’s smile. They believed it. If she could fool the people who knew him best, perhaps she could fool all of London.
But as she looked out at the sea of silks, a tremor of nerves settled in her stomach. This was the first time she had ever gambled with a lie this large, and as the music began to swell for the next set, she realized the performance had only just begun.