Chapter 9 #2
He had noticed it recently. He was not certain when it had first registered, only that once it had, he could not un-see it.
She carried herself the same way in every room, that straight, considered posture that he had always taken for rigidity, for the particular brand of composure she had built her entire reputation on.
But it was not the same in every room. He had seen her with Yvette.
He had seen her when she thought nobody was paying attention, and the line of her shoulders then was entirely different from what it was now.
She raised them when she was nervous. He was nearly certain she did not know she did it.
“Emily.” He said her name quietly. “Shoulders.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then something in her face gave, just slightly, and he watched her shoulders drop.
The movement was small, and the effect was not.
The composure was still there, but something had loosened, and she looked, in the space of that single exhale, younger and less certain and entirely real.
A small, teasing smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Wow. Amazing.”
“What?” she asked, confused as she searched his eyes.
“You actually know how to follow instructions,” he said. “That’s truly amazing.”
Her eyes closed briefly in the manner of a woman exercising considerable restraint. “You are insufferable,” she whispered.
Theodore watched her, the amusement he had felt moments ago evaporating into a sharp curiosity.
He didn't release his mental grip on the question that had been festering since she had dropped her secret in his lap.
“How did you come by the child, Emily? If there was no tryst, no grand, scandalous affair of your own, then how did a woman like you find herself at the center of this storm?”
Emily didn't flinch. She looked toward the lamp and let a soft smile cross her face. “I suppose, there is no point in keeping the secret from you any longer,” she said. “You deserve to know at least. If this is the last time we are to speak, I may as well satisfy your curiosity.”
She was quiet for a moment. She looked at the curtained window before turning back to him.
“My sister,” she said. “Her name was Anne.
The one my parents held up as the measure of everything.
But she fell in love with a man my family did not approve of.
A carpenter's son. No title, no fortune, no standing. She left with him in the middle of the night, and my parents disowned her the same week.”
Theodore said nothing.
“I kept writing to her,” Emily continued.
“In secret, of course. For six years I wrote to her, and she wrote back, and I kept every letter and told nobody.” She looked down at her hands.
“A few months ago, I found out that she and her husband had died. They left a son. A six-year-old boy. His name is Frederick.”
The library was very still around them.
“Frederick is her son,” Emily said. “He was in the carriage when the accident happened. He has a scar on his cheek from it.” She looked up.
“When I found out he was alone, I went and got him. My parents do not want him. I think he is too much of a reminder of what went wrong for them. They will send him to an orphanage in one month if I do not marry and take him with me. They refuse to raise him. That is the whole of it.”
Theodore looked at her. He had expected something. He was not entirely certain what, only that he had expected a story with cleaner edges than this one, something more manageable, something that would make more sense of the lengths she had gone to. He had not expected this.
“Who are you, Emily Pierce?” he said quietly.
She looked at him for a moment, then slowly walked forward to the table and leaned against it beside him, close enough that their arms were nearly touching, both of them facing the same direction now, looking out at the same dark room.
“You are going to extraordinary lengths...” he said. “...for a boy you have known for only a few months.”
“He is Anne's son.”
“I know that. I understand that. But you did not know him. You had never met him. Yet you are doing all of this to give him a good home.” He shook his head slowly. “I do not know if I would do the same.”
“You cannot put yourself in my shoes,” she said. “Society does not ask the same things of you that it asks of me.”
“No,” he agreed. “It does not. Which makes it more remarkable, not less.”
She said nothing to that.
He was quiet for a moment. “I heard about your sister. During her debut Season. She was the diamond, was she not?”
Emily turned to look at him.
“Before you,” he said. “Before any of it. Her sudden departure must have been difficult for you. The responsibility.” He held her gaze. “That must have been an extraordinary amount of pressure for one person to carry.”
Something shifted in her eyes. A slow, careful opening, the way a door opens when someone has finally decided to stop holding it shut.
She looked at him, and he looked back at her, and in the low amber light of the library, he thought that he had been looking at Emily Pierce for years and had not, until this moment, been looking at her at all.
He had been so wrong about her.
He had decided what she was before he knew; he had looked at the composure and the precise, careful way she moved through every room and decided she was rigid. Decided she was cold. Decided there was nothing underneath the performance worth finding.
He had been spectacularly, completely wrong.
“I... I could help you,” he said, the words leaving his lips before his mind could fully vet them.
He mentally recoiled the moment the offer hung in the air.
What was he even doing? This was a woman who, by all accounts, should despise him for his arrogance and his original motives.
Yet, as he looked at her, the irritation he had felt all evening was replaced by a staggering, marrow-deep respect.
He didn't understand why he was suddenly desperate to be her ally, but he knew he couldn't simply watch her navigate this minefield alone anymore.
“I could help you vet the gentlemen,” he added, his voice steadier now, though the absurdity of the proposal wasn't lost on him.
“I know these men, Emily. I know which ones have hearts of stone and which ones are looking for nothing more than a parlor ornament.
If you are to find a protector for yourself and the boy, you should at least have a second pair of eyes that aren't clouded by desperation.”
Emily turned her head sharply, her eyes widening. She looked at him for a long beat, searching his face for a sign of a joke or a hidden trap. For a second, her mask of composure slipped entirely, replaced by a raw, genuine surprise.
“You would do that for me, Your Grace?” Emily asked.
“I am offering, am I not?”
Before she could respond, the heavy silence of the library was shattered. The sharp clack of heels on the parquet floor and the rising murmur of voices echoed from just outside the library doors.
Emily gasped. “That sounds like people are coming in —”
Theodore’s instincts flared. Without a word of explanation, his hand found hers, and he pulled her with him, away from the table, across the narrow width of the library to the far end where the windows were, where the heavy burgundy curtains hung in thick, generous folds from ceiling to floor.
He drew her into the alcove behind them, pressing them both back into the deep recess of the window, and pulled the curtain across with his free hand until the gap was no wider than a thread.
She was pressed against him, her back almost against the cold glass of the window, and he was in front of her, one hand still holding the curtain closed, the other having released hers somewhere in the movement without his noticing when.
There was very little space. The alcove had not been designed with two people in mind, and the result was that there was perhaps the width of a breath between them, no more, and he could feel the warmth of her through the thin silk of her gown and the clean scent of something floral that he had not been close enough to notice before.
“Your Grace, this is entirely inappropriate!” Emily said in a hushed tone, placing both hands on his chest to create some semblance of distance between them.
He did not look at her.
He looked at the thin line of light coming through the gap in the curtain and listened to the voices growing closer.
“Your Grace,” she whispered.
His hand came up and covered her mouth before he had decided to do it. The other hand pressed flat against the window behind her head, his arm braced beside her, and he leaned in close and said, against her temple, so quietly it was barely a sound at all. “Hush.”
She went still.
They looked at each other in the thin, silver light filtering through the small window.
It was barely enough to see by, but it was enough.
Enough to see her eyes, wide and dark, looking directly into his.
Enough to see her chest rising and falling with a speed that matched his own, the silk of her gown moving against him with every breath she took.
He could feel it. That was the problem. He could feel every breath she drew, her chest against his, the warmth of her radiating through the small impossible distance between them, and he thought with the distant, useless clarity of a man whose body and mind had stopped cooperating, that he needed to steady his own breathing, that two people breathing this loudly behind a curtain were not hidden, they were simply postponing the inevitable.
But he could not steady it.
She was too close. She smelled of jasmine; her eyes had not moved from his; his hand was still over her mouth; her breath was warm against his palm... the whole situation had become something he had absolutely no framework for managing.