Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
“So, Lord Sterling?”
Theodore’s voice preceded him into the room, dry and resonant.
Emily startled. The book in her hands nearly slipped from her fingers before she caught it, pressing it flat against her chest with both palms. He stepped into the circle of candlelight, reaching up to peel the black velvet mask from his face.
He looked weary, the sharp lines of his jaw tightened by a tension that had nothing to do with the hour.
The library was a long, narrow room on the eastern side of the Kingswell estate, lined floor to ceiling with dark shelves that smelled of old leather and beeswax.
A reading table ran down the center of it, solid and wide, with two chairs tucked beneath it and a single lamp burning at one end that threw the rest of the room into warm, uneven shadow.
At the far end, three tall windows looked out onto the garden, their heavy damask curtains drawn almost entirely closed, leaving only a thin blade of moonlight cutting across the floorboards.
The curtains were a deep burgundy, thick enough to muffle the faint sound of the orchestra still playing somewhere in the house beyond the closed door.
“What about him?” Emily asked, her voice breathy, her eyes tracking his every movement.
Emily slowly took off her mask and placed it on the table. She had positioned herself between the reading table and the shelves. Her back was to the books, the lamp at her left, and when she turned to face him, she had nowhere to go. He doubted she had thought about that when she chose the spot.
He set his mask down on the reading table, leaned against its edge, braced one hand against the wood, and looked at her.
He had watched her dance with Lord Sterling earlier that evening.
He had not meant to watch. He had been in conversation with Christopher on the other side of the ballroom.
He had simply looked up at the wrong moment and found them there, moving through the figures of a cotillion, Sterling's hand at her gloved fingers, his head angled toward her with the attention of a man who was genuinely interested in what the woman across from him was saying.
Emily had smiled. Had laughed at something, her head tilting in that particular way it tilted when a conversation had properly caught her, and she had looked, from where Theodore was standing, without meaning to be watching, entirely at ease.
It had bothered him.
He had no intention of examining that further.
“I saw you dancing, is all,” he said, his gaze dropping to the table for a moment before snapping back to hers. “You seemed to find his company quite... agreeable.”
He didn't wait for her to defend herself.
He knew the clock was against them; every second they spent in this shadow-drenched room was a gamble with her reputation.
If a servant or a stray guest wandered in, the scandal Julia had threatened would become an irreversible reality.
He had to be fast. The raw, jagged way they had parted at his estate had been a festering wound all week, and he could tell by the way her fingers clutched the book that she was just as haunted by it as he was.
“We cannot stay here long,” he murmured, his voice dropping an octave as he moved around the table. “But after the wreckage of that morning at the conservatory, I couldn't allow another day to pass with the silence between us.”
Emily looked at him. She did not say anything.
He leaned against the reading table, his palms flat against the wood behind him, his weight settled back on his hands.
She was to his left, her shoulder near the shelves, close enough that the lamplight caught the side of her face and threw the rest of it into shadow.
They were not looking at each other directly.
They were looking at the middle distance between them, which was perhaps easier.
“We cannot continue this courtship,” he said. “The charade is finished, Emily.”
He turned to look at her as he said it. He had expected something.
A flicker of distress, perhaps, or the particular controlled blankness she deployed when something had landed and she was deciding how to receive it.
What he saw instead was neither of those things.
Her expression did not change in any dramatic way.
She simply looked at him, steady and clear, and then she looked down at the book still resting on the table beside his hand.
“No,” she said. “I suppose we cannot.”
She said it quietly and then sighed.
“You have prospects,” he said. “Better ones, perhaps, than when this started. Whatever comes of this Season, your name has been attached to mine, and that will not disappear overnight, I suppose. Sterling seems genuinely interested.” He paused.
“You looked well together. Better prospects than a man whose godmother is currently sharpening her knives for you, right?”
She paused, her gaze tracking the flickering candlelight on the table before she looked back at his face. They were quiet for a moment. The curtains shifted slightly at the window, some small movement of air from somewhere.
“But tell me something, Your Grace,” she finally said. “What was in this for you? Why did you agree to this arrangement in the first place? I don’t think I ever asked you that.”
He almost smiled. “You want to know why I agreed in the first place.”
“You told me you had no interest in marriage. You told me that clearly. Yet you danced with me twice and kissed my hand, agreed to pretend to court me, knowing my secret, and stood in your own conservatory and defended me in front of your godmother. Even though you don’t know the truth.
” She tilted her head. “So yes. I want to know why.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he shifted his weight slightly on the table. There was no particular reason not to tell her, now that it was over.
“Lady Birks’ plan,” he said. “The list. The whole thing.” He paused.
“I wanted it to fail. On my terms. I had intended to choose the worst possible candidate, someone she would take one look at and immediately regret the entire scheme.” He glanced at her sideways.
“You were not the worst candidate, Emily. That was not why I agreed to court you. You were not what I had in mind.”
Emily looked at him.
“But then you told me about this child,” he said.
“So I figured you were a woman with a secret that Lady Birks will never accept. The moment she found out, she would end it herself. I would not even have to do anything.” He turned to look at her properly.
“I had no intention of letting anyone use it against you. What happened in the conservatory was not part of any plan. I am sorry it happened that way.”
The library breathed around them.
“So you were using me,” Emily said. “As I was using you.”
He looked at her. “Does that upset you?”
She considered his question honestly. “No,” she said.
“Who am I to be upset? I had my own reasons for every step of this. I cannot be angry at you for having yours. You were right. I do have better prospects now than I did before. Whatever else this was, it was that.” She looked at him directly. “I am grateful for it.”
He held her gaze for a moment.
Then she straightened, and something in her manner shifted back to the practical, composed version of herself that he had come to recognize as her armor going back on.
She glanced toward the heavy oak door, her posture stiffening.
“You did not need to do this,” she said.
“Call me to the library in the middle of a masquerade ball to announce it. It was already obvious after that morning that the courtship was finished. Anyone could have seen us come in here. The risk was entirely unnecessary.”
Theodore looked at her, watching the way her eyes darted toward the shadows and the door. A small, unexpected chuckle escaped him, a dry sound that lacked its usual edge of mockery.
“You are nervous,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she retorted. “I am alone, in a dark library with a gentleman. If you have finished announcing the end of our courtship, then I must go.”
Theodore didn’t move. He remained anchored against the table, as his chuckle faded. Emily held his gaze for only a moment before she turned to leave, but his hand found her wrist as she made the first move.
It was a light thing. Two fingers, no more, curling gently around the inside of her wrist before she had taken a full step, and she stilled immediately.
He drew her toward him, slowly, with no particular force behind it, until she was standing in front of him, close enough that she was at his eye level, with him leaning back against the table the way he was.
He released her wrist, but she didn't pull away. She stood there, breathless and silent, her gaze locked onto his.
He looked at her. At the freckles, which the lamplight had found with an almost deliberate quality, were scattered across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks.
He had always thought them incongruous. He had said so himself, and he had meant it.
They had never seemed to belong on a face so composed, so determined, so thoroughly arranged against any possible softness.
He was finding, increasingly and against his better judgment, that he had been wrong about that.
They suited her. He did not know when exactly that had shifted, only that it had, and that standing here in the low light of a library with her close enough to notice the detail of them, he could not imagine her face without them.
He did not say any of that. “Drop your shoulders,” he said instead.
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your shoulders.” He looked at them, then back at her face. “Drop them.”
She looked at him with furrowed eyebrows. “They are perfectly fine where they are.”
“They are up around your ears,” he said pleasantly. “Drop them.”