Chapter 2 #3
If she accepted, then this would become real. Not the danger—danger was already real—but the answer to it. She would not say yes too quickly. To do so would feel too much like falling. Yet when she lifted her eyes to his again, her refusal would not come.
“Tell me,” she said. “What happens next?”
His face changed then. Not triumph. Something quieter. Recognition, perhaps, that she had crossed a threshold and knew it.
He leaned forward.
“First,” he said, “we shall need a better dress.”
The absurdity of it met the gravity of everything else and, to Lydia’s annoyance, nearly drew a smile from her.
But he was not finished.
“A lady may be quietly desperate in a worn morning gown,” he said. “A future bride must appear as though she has not spent the night contemplating fraud, extortion, and the collapse of civil society.”
Despite herself, Lydia let out a soft breath that might almost have been laughter.
“And how,” she asked, “do you propose I achieve such a miraculous transformation?”
Edward’s gaze moved over the tired blue muslin, then rose to her face again so steadily that the path of it was more noticeable than any overt stare would have been.
His look did not feel insulting. That, somehow, made it worse.
“We begin with my sister-in-law,” he said. “Clara possesses excellent sense, a fatal weakness for impossible causes, and more influence over dressmakers than ought to belong to any one woman.”
“You mean to tell her?”
“I mean to tell her enough.”
Lydia’s pulse gave a strange little leap.
A sister-in-law implied drawing rooms, family acknowledgment, the thing becoming suddenly and alarmingly larger than the two of them and a reckless proposal made on a bench near the hackney stand.
“You are very certain she will agree.”
Edward’s mouth moved at last, though only faintly. “No. I am very certain she will interfere. In this case, the distinction favors us.”
The smile she had tried to suppress threatened her properly this time.
She looked away before it could fully form.
That was a mistake. Looking away did not lessen his presence. It only made her more aware of it—the deep, even timbre of his voice, the easy economy of his movements, the sense that he occupied space without ever rushing to prove he had the right.
Last night she had been too frightened to notice him as a man. This morning she noticed far too much.
The realization made heat creep up the back of her neck.
Edward saw it and was gentleman enough not to remark upon it. He was, however, ungentlemanly enough to feel a pulse of wholly untimely satisfaction.
Dangerous, he warned himself. Dangerous and absurd. He ought to be thinking of the forged note, Henslow, Finchley’s likely associates, and how best to get eyes on the account books without alerting their owner.
Instead he was noticing the delicate shape of Lydia’s wrist where her sleeve had fallen back a fraction, the stubborn line of her mouth, the intelligence that sharpened her face whenever she argued.
He had met beauties before. They had rarely interested him beyond the first half hour.
But this was the far more inconvenient allure of a mind refusing to bend merely because the world expected it to break.
He rose.
Lydia’s gaze snapped back to him at once.
Her body readied at once—instinctive, defensive.
Edward stopped where he was.
The movement was small, yet it altered everything. Not because he stepped back, but because he let her see him choose stillness rather than press closer.
A quiet understanding passed between them.
“You need not trust me all at once,” he said.
The words were low. Matter-of-fact. Almost gentle.
Her throat tightened unexpectedly.
No one had said such a thing to her in months. Most people demanded trust in the same breath they excused the ways they had not deserved it.
“And if I never do?” she asked.
A faint line appeared between his brows, not from offense but thought.
“Then I shall be inconvenienced,” he said. “But you will still be protected.”
The answer was so entirely unlike what she had braced herself to hear that for one helpless instant she could only stare. Her heartbeat turned over once, hard and strange.
This man, she thought, would be far easier to manage if he were either a libertine or a saint.
Unfortunately, he seemed to be neither.
“Mr. Hallworth—” she began.
“Edward,” he said.
The correction fell into the room with indecent softness.
She looked at him.
“No,” she said, though the word lacked force enough to convince either of them.
His eyes warmed very slightly. “An excellent beginning to intimacy, Miss Ashby. We are quarreling over forms of address already.”
“I am not seeking intimacy.”
“No,” he said. “At present you are seeking solvency and revenge. I merely hope to keep pace.”
That did it. A startled laugh escaped her before she could prevent it.
The sound seemed to surprise them both. Edward’s expression altered at once. Not into triumph. Into something more arresting: simple, unguarded pleasure.
It transformed him.
The lazy charm society attributed to him was still there, but lighter now and less practiced. For one perilous moment Lydia glimpsed what he must be like when he forgot to perform himself for the world.
Her laugh faded. The air did not feel quite the same afterward. The air held, perceptible and taut, like the instant before one discovers whether a spark will die or catch.
Edward, who knew perfectly well he ought to retreat from that moment rather than lean into it, took one unconscious step nearer before checking himself. The restraint cost him more than it ought.
“There. You see? We are improving already.”
Lydia gathered what remained of her composure and rose again because sitting still had become impossible.
“When do we go to your sister-in-law?”
“An hour,” he said. “You may wash. Hawkins will bring up a maid, if you permit it. I shall send for a modiste to meet us later.”
She stared. “A maid as well?”
“If I am to convince society I have lost my senses over you, I must begin by making you impossible to dismiss.”
That should have sounded outrageous.
Instead it sent a curious, uncomfortable warmth through her—part alarm, part gratitude, and part something altogether less safe.
“Do not say such things so calmly,” she muttered.
“Would you prefer them declaimed?”
“No.”
“Then I shall endeavor to remain offensively composed.”
He moved toward the door.
Lydia watched him reach for the latch, then stop.
Without turning, he said, “One further question.”
His tone made her still.
“Yes?”
“When Finchley took hold of your wrist yesterday”—he turned then, and his gaze dropped, briefly but unmistakably, to the place where the soreness still lingered beneath her sleeve—“did he leave a mark?”
Lydia’s mouth went dry.
How swiftly he moved from wit to danger. How little she liked the answer that formed in her body before it formed in words.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
Edward’s jaw shifted once.
“Show Clara,” he said. “Not me. Show Clara. Let there be one more witness to what sort of man we are dealing with.”
The care in that instruction undid her more than if he had demanded proof outright. He would have looked away if she had needed it. He had known that before she did.
A soft, treacherous warmth moved through her chest. Lydia had the absurdest impulse to ask him to stay—not because she had anything further to say, but because the room seemed somehow emptier at the mere thought of his leaving.
He opened the door, one hand tightening briefly on the latch before he mastered the movement.
Then, as if he could not entirely help himself, he glanced back.
“Miss Ashby?”
She lifted her head.
“Eat the last piece of toast,” he said. “If we are to stage a convincing engagement, you must not faint before luncheon. It would create the wrong kind of romance.”
The door shut behind him before she could answer.
The sound seemed to linger in the room.
Lydia remained where she was, staring at the panels as though they might explain what had just occurred. For one foolish second she nearly crossed the room after him. The impulse vanished as swiftly as it had come, leaving heat in its wake.
Then she looked down at the final piece of toast still on the tray.
To her own astonishment, she smiled—then gave the smallest shake of her head at herself, as if disbelief were the only defense she had left.
It was brief. Fragile. Gone almost as soon as it came.
But it had been real.
The startling recognition that he had spoken as though there would indeed be a next step—a next hour, a next plan, something beyond merely enduring until evening and beginning the whole wretched cycle again—settled more fully in her now.
Beyond the windows, wheels rolled on and voices rose from the street below.
London continued in its usual selfish fashion.
But Lydia stood straighter in the unfamiliar room and felt, for the first time in many weeks, not safe exactly—she was too sensible to mistake one thing for another—but steadier, less hunted, less alone.
The sensation was fragile enough to frighten her if she examined it too closely, so she did not.
She crossed to the desk, took up the last triangle of toast, and ate it because he had told her to and because, more dangerously still, she found she did not mind obeying when the order had been wrapped in concern rather than command.
That thought she set down at once, firmly, before it could grow teeth.
Finchley had not yet won.
And if she had any say in it, he would not decide what became of her next.
But as she reached for the teapot and poured what remained into her cup, another thought followed close behind, one she could not so easily dismiss.
Mr. Edward Hallworth might prove every bit as reckless as she feared. The danger was that she was beginning to suspect he might also prove exactly the sort of man she could trust.